Starting the armature

Yesterday, I worked out several different options for the armature set up - it's not just about the sculpt being supported but at what level it is best sculpted at and how it will be transported. The size of my project means transportation from the modelmaking studio to the upstairs resin room in the workshop will have to happen via a hoist. I had to measure the hoist cage carefully to make sure the moveable part of the armature base and the sculpt will fit safely in it. I did some diagrams below showing some of the options, eventually settling on option 2. A lowerable platform was added to the design to raise the sculpt from the base it's fixed to to allow the underside of the sculpt to be fibreglassed once the rest has been moulded/supported.

This second diagram was to work out how high the table had to be so the top of the sculpt wasn't too high for me to reach. I scaled up the previous sketch of the sitting Kijimuna to match the head size of the full-size WED clay head maquette and used this to measure roughly how tall the sculpt would be in the end.

I constructed the table and sourced some scaffolding pole and key clamps on Friday, so on Monday, yesterday and today I made the rest of the base and fixed some of the armature to the scaff pole:

I cut the leg wire as one long piece and made sure the measurements were equal on both sides. I made the hand and feet wire into loops so that wires can be added to the fingers / toes if need be...

I used bridger (Isopon P40) to fix the armature together. In order to mould the arms separately, I had to make sure they were easily deattachable from the rest of the sculpt. I used solid and hollow metal box section to create a 'slot-on/slot-off' section in the shoulder to help with this: