Sculpting Skye again: body

Post about sculpting the body of grown-up version of Skyefigure.

Sculpting her head and wings have separate posts, and you can find all the posts relevant to making the figure set Skye is part of in this tag.

I made her an armature with various metal wires: spine and legs are 2mm aluminum wire, forelimbs are 1mm aluminum wire. I used 0.3mm jewelry wire to attach them to each other. The above isn't quite the armature's finished state, as I still added another 2mm aluminum wire to the spine from neck to base of the tail before baking clay onto it, and later 0.8mm steel wire for the other weight-bearing toe of each foot. Here she also already has aluminum foil on her tail for the tail fan. The torso will have a lump of foil inside it as filler.

The legs also got foil padding, though the amount seen here is a big underestimation of how much I ended up needing. I was just being careful not to add too much at first, since adding more material later is easier than taking it off.

Then I started on the tail. First I covered the foil with thin sheets of clay on each side, then started shaping it, mostly with my trusty sewing pin and craft blade, but also scissors here and there. I'd used the scissors to cut the foil more into shape before adding the clay.

Starting to look like something. Because the tail is curved, I cut a few slits to the foil with the scissors between feathers at the middle of the curve, to overlap the foil more on the inside of the curve and to separate the feathers more on the outside of it. Since this was a lot of work before I could bake the whole thing, I took my time and let the tail stay unbaked for a couple of days as I worked on it.

As the last thing before baking, I drew feather details with the sharp end of the sewing pin.

The feathers on the actual tail in the middle were added later little by little. They're each a flattened ball of clay with detail drawn on with the sewing pin (it varies whether I drew the detail before or after attaching, depending on how much I wanted the individual feathers to stand out in a particular spot - feathers already detailed before attaching end up less smushed against each other), blended into the body with liquid clay at the base for a secure attachment, and the blending hidden with other feathers the way they would naturally overlap, which is why I started feathering her from the back towards the front.

These really represent only the tips of feathers, which would be longer than this, but I can't make them as flat as real feathers are, so overlapping them would not be as smooth if I made more of each feather than what needs to be visible. As mentioned in the wing post, this is Skye's adult plumage, so I want her to look more tidy and put together than her ruffled juvenile plumage that she is constantly outgrowing, and constantly moulting to keep up.

lol Now that we've just established I want this version of Skye to look more elegant... Please excuse the awkward angle, ma'am, but I've got to sculpt your butt feathers somehow.

Some of the feathers have a different, fluffier texture, mostly on the head and neck, and under the tail. For that I used less individual feathers, and instead carved shapes into the clay using the sewing pin and a loop of the 1mm aluminum wire, which I then smoothed with the silicon brush tool and lots of liquid clay to avoid the brush pulling crumbs off the clay.

I mostly baked the body in a foil baking pan, with another one upside down on top of it to shield the clay from too direct exposure to the heat source. She just fits in it. I baked her on her back when working on the underside, and that was also fine for the dorsal side of the tail for the most part, since so far there isn't enough weight resting on the tail to flatten detail.

For most of the dorsal detail baking, I propped her up with foil clumps under the tail and chest.

Adding more chonk to the legs before detailing them, too. I tried to use foil to fill out the shapes as much as I could instead of putting a very thick layer of clay onto the figure. It makes the figure lighter, and less likely to have problems baking evenly.

The lower back has smoother feathers than the tail, since the curve of the spine makes a little dip there, if only a very slight one, and so the feathers are more pushed together. I added a thin sheet of clay over the whole area, and drew most of the feathers directly onto that. I used the plastic straw cut into a stamp for feather outlines, then pushed the clay on each feather a little over the feather underneath to get the overlapping effect, using the round end of the sewing pin.

Some of the feathers are still added on with flattened clay balls, but I took care to make them very thin by putting a smooth piece of foil between my finger and the clay when flattening them, since the clay sticks to it less than it does to warm skin.

To keep track of where her blue stripe will go, I marked it with feathers made out of blue clay. The stripe won't match the blue clay's placement exactly after being painted, and I intended it as mostly a guideline, but I did end up also keeping quite a few of the blue feathers' colour visible in the figure's finished look.

Even more chonk added before detailing the thighs.

And more padding to the ribcage area, too. Since this layer of clay is all going to get covered up (and even if not, the figure is gong to be painted), I used scrap clay. Sometimes clays of different colours get unintentionally mixed and I can't use them to mix exact colours or somewhere visible that won't get painted anymore, but no reason to let that go to waste. (One of the dorsal tailfeathers is also a bean of scrap clay I spotted on the work surface while working on the tail, which is why it's slightly brown. It's not burned.) A lot of these particular scraps are from making Tempest and Cloudburst's hands and feet.

The underbelly feathers are loosely overlapped and very thin, and have detail on both sides in case the underside is visible from some angle.

After attaching the wings I'd sculpted separately, I decided the tail is too short and thin to do justice to the majestic palm frond of floof that Skye should have bobbing behind her. I think I'd measured it wrong when making the armature, and treated the length I'd written down as being for just the tail to be the length of the tail + tailfan, and adding the wings made clear it wasn't quite proportionate. No problem, let's give it an extension. Above is a "before" photo of the underside.

I cut and folded a piece of foil into shape, here being fitted to decide how to place it. I ended up adding it to the opposite side.

Then it's covering the foil with clay sheets again, and shaping and detailing it like I first did with the tail.

And baked! The tail is off-center compared to the fan for now, but I'll fix that when I add more tail covert feathers.

The dorsal side didn't receive feather detail at the same time, and I just sculpted the shape of each tail fan feather before baking. The old edge of the tail poked through the thin extension too much and left the surface lumpy, and it was difficult to do anything about that while the tail extension was still soft.

After baking, the extension stayed in place, and I could add a thin layer of clay onto each feather to smooth out the bumps and draw the detail. A little tedious, but I think it turned out quite pretty.

Adding ventral tail coverts. There's a lump of foil under there for filler, continuing alongside and towards the base of the tail on top of the existing tail shape. The extension made the tail look too thin vertically, so this was also to fix that.

And adding more coverts on the dorsal side, too. I'd been a bit careless with their placement initially anyway, and the tail fan had more of it showing on one side than the other in the middle, as I hadn't followed the curve of the tail very well, so I'm glad I did give the tail an upgrade.

I did have measurements and reference drawings, but a lot of the sculpting process was still looking at what I have and deciding something looked too big or too small to fit with the rest of it and making adjustments.

Then covering the wing attachment wire tangles and sculpting the rest of the back feathers. They're again a sheet of clay with details mostly drawn on, with foil here and there between wires.

Before I did attach the wings, I took the time to figure out some things about the head's attachment. I wanted to get the wire loop at the neck in the right position before attaching the wings, as that involved holding the figure by the ribcage rather tightly and probably shifting the spine wire around a bit despite gripping it with pliers at the same time, and the wings would have been in the way and at risk of damage in that rougher treatment. The clay on the ribcage did crack a little at the back, as I thought it might, so I consider the precautions to have been necessary. The crack is in a place where I'll still add more clay on top of it anyway, so not a problem.

Where exactly the wire loop should be was hard to estimate with the head still in two pieces and difficult to test-fit on the body, so it did end up not being quite correct, but aluminum wire is soft enough it's easy to cut when it's unintentionally poking out of a sculpture's neck.

Yes, it's very nice how the left wing only touches the leg under it near the hip, but how are you going to paint that? Problem for future me.

Still missing chest feathers.

Slowly gaining those. They're more V than U-shaped to transition into the neck fluff.

Then I started to build what I could of the neck still using polymer clay, little by little, and between each bake giving the head a fitting to figure out where I'd have to transition to non-bake mediums, since the head couldn't be baked anymore. At this point the upper and lower jaw had been united, so I could see better where exactly each part of the head would go.

The spine wire's loop was indeed a little too much to the left, especially since I wanted Skye's head to be turned to the right, so not wanting to twist the wire anymore at this point, I cut part of the loop off.

Then building a wall of clay feathers there, too. There's a bit of foil filler, but I'm leaving room for the head's tangle of wires inside the neck.

Adding feather detail to the neck, including making the throat area with clay already in the right colour so I don't have to paint there. Mostly individual feathers again, but the underside of the neck has softer feathers that are sculpted as more of a single mass.

After I'd made as much of the neck as I could, there were still the legs left to finish. I built the shape of the ankles first. They're mostly covered under fluff on the finished figure, but I didn't want them to end up too thin, like they might if they don't have enough material under that fluff.

Starting on the ankle frills. I smoothed raw clay teardrop-shapes onto the leg.

I made a bunch of flat, slightly curved feathers that are textured on both sides, and baked them. Then I stuck the prebaked feathers on the raw clay on the leg, over the teardrop feathers. A few are under the raw clay instead, depending on what looked better, and I added a few new unbaked flat feathers, too, before baking again.

I want the birdbloomers to look light and floofy, and I don't think I quite managed that with epoxy putty on juvie Skye. These ankle ruffles are more like what I had in mind.

Adding more raw clay feathers little by little, until reaching the 3D feathers I'd already sculpted on the legs earlier. This again took several bakes to avoid squishing feathers I'd already made. Drawing the feather detail on especially the inner sides of the legs took some acrobatics on how to hold the pin for a good angle, and the loop of nylon line was very useful there.

After finishing the pants, I gave the body one last bake of two and a half hours (because 30 minutes per each quarter of an inch the clay sculpture is thick. The clay should be fine being baked for that long if the temperature is correct and it's shielded from direct exposure to the heat source). After that, I attached the head to the body and sculpted the rest of the neck, but that's covered in the post about the head. This figure had a lot of work stages.

But there's still her feet to finish. I used epoxy putty for this, as it's durable and hard when cured, so it should suit weight-supporting parts well. It also cures by chemical reaction rather than needing to be baked, and I wouldn't be able to put the body in the oven anymore with the head and its meltable plastic parts already attached (though that does make it a bit more hazardous material, so be sure to follow safety instructions when using epoxy products).

The first pass of sculpting for each foot was mostly making the general shapes of the third and fourth toe, still needing tweaks but already textured with the circular scale stamp made out of a plastic-coated paperclip. I made indents for the claws, but, except for one, I found it easier to not attach them until the next pass, and one of them I glued in place after the putty had cured. How finished I managed to make the tip of the toe around the base of the claw on this first pass determined which way worked best with attaching each claw.

The metatarsals already had some putty on them at this point, because that's where I'd put the leftovers of sculpting neck feathers. The amount of putty you mix cures whether you do something with it or not, so it's good to find a use for the rest if you mix more than needed, as I usually do.

Second and third pass: each a fresh batch of putty after the previous one has cured, for attaching claws, then adding a coil of putty around the base of the claw to make it neater. (The claws were already cured, making raptor claws has been another way I use up leftovers.) I also built a pad at the back of the foot like raptors probably had, and it will help keep the figure from falling backwards.

I made the first (dewclaw) and second (sickle claw) toe for each foot with polymer clay and baked them separately before attaching, like I did with Tempest and Cloudburst's sickle claws. I made them using clay in already the right colours in case it gets tricky to paint there (it did).

And fourth pass of epoxy putty on each foot was attaching them both. The polymer clay toes are more lightweight than epoxy putty ones would be, so they stayed on there easily without supports while the putty cured.

And with that, she's finally in one piece, all separate parts combined!

Fifth pass for each foot (now 10 passes total): smoothing the seams between materials.

Passes 11-14 were adding scutes to the toes, as well as some adjustments to the shape of the metatarsals and the bases of the toes before adding those scutes, and tweaks here and there to bottoms of toetips and the pad at the back of the foot for stability. Skye has been able to stand since her feet were still just wires, which was a pleasant surprise meaning I'd balanced her well, but at this point she was also starting to not need just-in-case supports.

The toe scutes are square-ish pieces I cut from a flattened snake of putty and attached one at a time to get them to overlap a little.

On passes 15 and 16 at sculpting the feet, I added scutes to the metatarsals, which were a mix of the same technique as the toe scutes, and bigger sheets of putty onto which I drew lines. I'd already made a couple of scutes near the ankles with polymer clay before adding the feathers on top of that.

And that's it! Took me almost six months, but Skye is finally sculpted! :D
Now onto painting her.