Shoemoney Head Sculpt

being primarily a painter, sculpting doesn't come too naturally to me. the first thing i made from sculpey was a baby head so i thought i'd continue with a head with no hair. working in 3 dimension requires more than one photo of a subject so i thought i'd use Jeremy Schoemaker, a.k.a Shoemoney, as a subject for my second head sculpt. Jeremy has a shaved head so that deals with the hair problem, and there are a lot of photos of him online so that helps with the 3d aspect. plus he has pretty cool ear shapes.


it's difficult to work on such a small scale. goodness knows how the toy sculptors do it. i imagine they end up cross eyes before long. :)


unfortunately the eyes are not very well worked in, as all of the pics of Jeremy have him wearing glasses. any sculptors out there with help when your subject has specs?

I made a Baby!

i made a baby.

not a real one, goodness no. i can barely take care of myself let alone another human being. cats are my limit. they kinda take care of themselves anyway, or just tell you what they want (sit by the food bowl, sit by the tap).

after thinking i'd try my hand at sculpture i ordered prosculpt from eBay to try modelling a few figures or suchlike. prosculpt is a plastic modelling clay just like super sculpey or fimo that you can model with. unlike using regular clay, instead of firing it in an kiln for hours, you can 'bake' it at home in your oven. it's also a lot less messy than using regular clay.

bulbgirl and i visited my family home, 4 of us sat around quietly playing and having fun with this fantastic stuff. more than an hour must have elapsed as i sat trying to model a baby head (trained as a painter not a sculptor). everyone should try it. time whizzes by as you get into it.


my dear old dad came into the house and checked out what we had been up to. he had barely touched my model when it fell from his grasp (in slow motion of course) and splatted on the floor. "my baby!" exclaimed i, but he just laughed. hopefully he was a little more cautious when i was a bairn. to suggest a sore cheek i quickly fashioned a hand and joined it to the head which he found funny.

"ooyah, my face hurts"

not sure i should give him a father's day present now. =P

Architectural Visualisation

a longtime friend of mine is a model maker. not the long leggy types but the small card, plastic or wood types. with everybody designing models on computer and doing computer simulated fly-throughs (should that be walk-throughs?), he went the traditional route and stayed with making the models by hand, even putting small lights which can be switched on and off. while computer work is great, when you have a degree show of 30 computer generated models and one traditional built model, which one do you think stands out? some architects seem to be moving away from cgi and like to go back to a more arty hands on look (but still want emailability). this quote comes from the independent:

Peter Jarvis, from the Society of Architectural Illustration (SAI), says some architects still prefer traditional sketches instead of the "all-singing, all-dancing software", especially when they want to woo a client in the early stages. He feels watercolours have more "integrity" than computers, but agrees that these days visualisers are more likely to be using 3D programmes.

there is something really cool about being able to hold a whole apartment block in the palm of your hand or knock down a tree with a swish of a finger. call it my godzilla complex. :)

he had a client who wanted an architectural visualisation (which is fancy speak for sketch) of a building. usually my friend would draw out the wireframe model, and outsource it to someone else. instead he asked me if i wanted to have a bash at it. the drawing below is what we sent them. we didn't get the gig but it was enjoyable to do as it was the first time i had used the software painter. quite different from oil paint. mix it with a bit of photoshoppery and hey presto:

what do you think?