Sparky WIP

Well, this is weird.

I'm a big fan of figurines. I appreciate the design and all the hard work that goes to them. But I'm not that huge collector of them (unless it is extremely cool or The Lion King related). Instead of that, I tend to buy collectible toys and figurines for others, usually as birthday gifts. 

So, last week I bought some figurines and got this irresistible urge to sculpt something. Anything! Instead of trying something hyper realistic and overly complicated, I thought it would be smart to sculpt something simple at first. Because let's face it, I haven't sculpted anything for.. probably over 10 years. When you have that kind of gap in any artistic field you have to start from the beginning or at least the simple things.

I haven't seen Frankenweenie (2012) yet but I really wanted to sculpt the dog character from the movie, Sparky. It's tiny, simple and quite cute character to work with. Luckily, I still had some Super Sculpey that I had bought one or two years ago so I could start sculpting right away.

For those who don't know, Super Sculpey is quite cool modeling clay. Many people like it because it is very soft  (a fresh Super Sculpey is so soft that you can easily push your finger in it) and it doesn't dry even if you leave it on table for weeks or even months. When it is baked you can polish it with sandpaper, drill it, paint it and do lots of other stuff to it. Many professionals use it to sculpt lots of awesome things. 

Now my Super Sculpey has a bit dried because it is almost two years old. But I could still sculpt something out of it. Because I'm not yet doing anything super detailed I don't need the clay to be extremely soft. The clay does get softer when you take little pieces and roll it in your hands but not as soft as it should be. But it's still workable and that's fine with me.

The sculpture is still  in process but it looks pretty promising.. Of course there's lot's of stuff to fix, like to make him more chubby, fix they eyes and eyebrows and stuff like that. But I'm optimistic. At least for now.

I can't really tell how I work when I am making a sculpture. It's the same thing with drawing and making paper crafts: I just do it. I don't make any plans beforehand unless I'm working on something that has very delicate parts and has to be done extremely carefully. When I was sculpting Sparky, I checked some images that I found from Google and just got into work. 

Maybe the most important thing that I have noticed while working on character that is not mine is that I don't even try to make it look on model right away. I make the character look like I think it looks. This way I can experiment a little bit and and pour out how I would work and stylize this character. 

When I have done a certain part, like the head, I check the reference to see what the head is really supposed to look. I check the differences and make the fixes. I don't feel bad for my mistakes, I just make observations and get back to work. It's more like "Oh, the head should be more chubbier.. More clay to the face then!". 

This sculpture doesn't have an armature inside of it because I don't have any wire to build one. The only tool that I use to make Sparky's tiny thin legs to hold his body is to put cocktail sticks inside the legs. I have tested them in my previous test sculpture and they worked very well. Nothing bad happens to them when the sculpture is put into oven.

I don't even have any fancy tools to sculpt. Just a toothpick, surgical knife and a small plastic spoon. Most of the time I use the toothpick to blend the clay pieces together and smoothen the surface.

Some pics of the early stages..

I'm curious will I ever actually finish this. I mean, it was never my goal to actually finish whatever I started to sculpt in the first place.

Working title, part 2

So far:
- storyboard is complete
- animatic is complete
- 5 shots of 21 are roughly animated
- music is under development

Looking good.

I’m not going to show the animatic here but you can have some screenshots. They are not in specific order.

Backgrounds are still missing because it depends on the music what they will look like.

This is going to be insanely short animation. Right now the animatic is 1 minute and 10 seconds long. Wow. Of course it will be possible that it will be few seconds longer but that’s still very short.

I decided that half of the animation will be drawn on paper and the other half digitally. I will especially draw those scenes digitally that worked perfectly on animatic. The other scenes that are good but still have some staging problems, I will try to figure out by drawing them on paper.

I would love to draw every single scene on paper but there are many problems with it:

1. Scanning takes too much time.

2. Some of the storyboard’s digital drawings have already perfect keyframes for animation. All they need is some inbetweening and that can be done on computer.

3. When I start to animate on paper I get tensed because my mind keeps telling me that everything has to be done perfectly. I just can’t relax and just work. I had the same problem before when I worked on my first animated short. It has been two years now and I still haven’t got rid of that feeling.

It will be interesting to see if there’s any difference between digitally and traditionally drawn scenes in the final work after the clean-up. Hmm.

And here’s a rough sculpture of the rabbit that I made one night (because obviously the best time to sculpt is nightime!):

The model was made from children’s clay and it has some wire inside to support it. And yes, because it was made from children’s clay it means that it doesn’t dry. At all. But it will be easy to reuse!

Remember when I said that the ears will be tough to animate? Turns out that those are the easiest parts. The thoughest is the head. THE HEAD. What the-

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Previous posts:

Part 1