MEASURE MEASURE MEASURE!!!

Building up the figure! When I’m sculpting a figure that I designed, even though it’s all in my head I still do a fair amount of measuring just to make sure the character still has the same pose and vibe as the drawing. With the NJ Monkey King figure I had only one view to work with, and the animation to refer to. As I blocked out the rough form, it’s all bout getting the thicknesses right and the pose.



If you look at the art next to the armature we can see the arms have a nice taper, the legs also have a nice line, thick at the thigh down to a nice thin width at the ankle. The head is much bigger then the body. When we’re lumping on the clay for the build-up keep checking the widths with your calipers. Calipers come in large, and teeny tiny. As we add clay and smooth it down I just keep making sure everything is about where it should be.



My Favorite Calipers



Take the measurment right from the art, to the clay



Also you can do ”Relative Measuring” in the MY art the head is at a 3/4 angle this can make it difficult to thinks like, how far apart are the eyes? How long is the neck? That’s when I start using relative measurements. Within the figure what visible aspects of the character can I use to as a guide for parts I can’t see. I used the eye width as a starting point for the head and face. How many eyes distance is the ear from the snout, the nose is about 1/2 of the length of the eye, and so on. This also helps if you reach a point where things just don’t look right. Look at the sculpt look at the art start making small comparisons and figure out step by step what’s out of place.



Excellent, now that we can measure like pros how do we take those lumpy blobs of clay and start smoothing them down! That’s the next installment, all will be revealed!

P.S. I hope this is all making sense, any feedback I can get to make it better as a learning forum is appreciated!