Colour Test 2

Second go at colouring this photo, using the same skin base, this time with a more red/pink type pattern that would cover the back and travel round the shoulders and face. I'd like to do a more interesting paint job than in previous projects...

The Sculpt

So I started massing out today, I'm conducting a time-lapse on the whole process and here's the first one - of course these earlier videos look more interesting because the changes are more drastic but I hope to move the camera steadily closer as I get into more detail...

NOTE TO PAUL: VIDEO 'SERVER REJECTED' AT THE MOMENT - WILL TRY AND RE-POST SOON BUT WILL GIVE YOU A COPY OF THE TIME LAPSES ANYWAY...

Colour Test 1

I've taken a 45 degree photo of the head maquette and coloured it in Photoshop. I've added a rough sketch of hair to give an indication of what the skin might look like on the final model. This is the first colour test I've done, it's just a simple mottled pattern but I still quite like it. The skin tone I did for the Capramostro project was probably the simplest form of skin colouring, so it would be nice if I could do something a little more exciting for this model.

Armature 2

I've attached a loop of wire to support the head, bridged the arms onto the solid box section in the shoulders and bulked out the main parts of the armature with plaster bandage. Tomorrow I hope to begin massing out in smooth buff clay - I want to sculpt in WED clay but due to the size of the sculpt I thought it'd be best to bulk out with a cheaper clay and use the wed on the surface to hold in more moisture and achieve sharp detail.

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:

Teeth 3

Today I cast out the final set of teeth. I used a dental acrylic kit from 'M R Dental' and chose a pre-coloured powder (pink) to go with the liquid monomer because I knew I would only be using the acrylic for the gums. Pictured below was my set up:

I chose a cold cure acrylic which means it does not need to be cast under a controlled heat whilst also under pressure (I would need an autoclave for this). I used a hydraulic pressure pot which was recommended to me by Darren and another industry professional to use for this purpose. I set up in our uni's polyester resin room which had the best ventilation and was wearing gloves and a respirator throughout. The photos below show an all-pink acrylic tester I did to practice with the material and one of the original gum sculpts with the teeth taken out and 'glued' into it's mould with tiny amounts of vaseline. The teeth are also acrylic, so they stayed imbedded in the acrylic gums (which means one chance to get them right!):

 

The next photos show me mixing the acrylic, pouring it into the mould (with the teeth imbedded), the mould in the pressure pot chamber after the acrylic had reached it's snap cure making it ready to be put in water and before the lid and pressure was put on. The last photo shows one half of the final set after de-moulding, they were ready to de-mould after roughly 20 min...

These teeth will now be put aside until the last minute, then they'll be coloured up and inserted into the model at the same time as the glass eyes.

Teeth 2

Pictures below are the moulds for my teeth with the original sculpts pulled out- I'm going to leave the teeth in the sculpted gums until they need to be embedded into the moulds so I don't loose them or forget what order / position they're in. I then made blanks of the teeth from fast cast, with a bit of tweaking, these will go into the Kijimuna sculpt to be sculpted around and will be screwed into the inside of the fibreglass mould like the eyes.

Instead of having to integrate an additional silicone plug into the mould to stop the Platgel from filling up the mouth cavity, I decided to make the mouth cavity and the teeth into one solid unit so it is easier to build the inside core around and so I don't have to worry about the Platgel sticking to the silicone plug (which would also have to be a platinum silicone!). I fixed the teeth into a slightly open position that I was happy with and filled in the gap with filler and Milliput, It was difficult to imagine what shape to make the cavity because I am essentially sculpting a negative space, but I remembered to leave the top and bottom of the teeth blanks clear so there will be a recess in the mouth where the real teeth can glue into. I also think the teeth will be open enough to warrant making a tongue to go inside...

Teeth!

So after deciding to have mostly human-looking teeth, I bought some loose acrylic ones off eBay to use to assemble my own upper and lower sets. I haven't properly scheduled the making of the teeth into the project so I figured sculpting the gums would be challenging enough let alone attempting to sculpt replicas of actual teeth - in industry the teeth (if close to a humans') would most likely be bought and then adapted to a fit a design anyway.

My friend Darren Grassby is a dental lab technician based in Bradford, he produces false teeth and dentures for FX purposes in his own time, has worked on teeth for Harry Potter and gave me some tips on the processes involved in making a set of good teeth (dentures or otherwise). Using the correct materials is important for getting the right look so I have ordered a kit of dental acrylic (pink powder and liquid monomer) to cast the gums in. He lent me a set of his own teeth to look at and I used these as reference when sculpting gums for my teeth. I considered using dental wax to sculpt the gums, pictured below (this is used often by dental technicians) but I am unfamiliar sculpting with this and decided the properties of Monster Clay would work in a similar way.

Pictured above is a collection of the teeth I bought pushed into some plasteline just to give me an idea of what order I wanted them to be in and what shades I wanted to use. Pictured below is the finished set of gums with the chosen teeth implanted. I made moulds of these this afternoon and will demould tomorrow.

Pose sketch-overs

As well as moulding the teeth, today I printed out my favourite 6 poses (3 standing, 3 sitting/kneeling) and drew the details of the Kijimuna over them to give myself a better idea of what it would look like in each stance. I then went round the studio asking lots of people which one looked the best / was most dynamic / was most in the Kijimuna's character. A lot of people chose the one I had really liked (the first sitting pose) and although it seems like the hardest one to mould, it is by far the one that best reflects the Kijimuna's child-like personality.

I will now scale up this sketch to get an idea of the size of my final model...

Pose variations

Today I took the plasteline figure from before and bent it into different possible positions that I could present the final model in. My drawing skills aren't developed enough to be able to brainstorm different stances on paper so I thought doing it through photography would work just as well. These were the ones I came up with:

They're kind of in an order from standing to sitting and it's hard to work some of them out due to the fact this model doesn't have hands or proper feet. Annoyingly, I prefer a lot of the sitting positions to the standing ones, it seems more in the Kijimuna's character that it would crouch close to the ground whilst picking at their catch of fish. I say annoyingly because this could potentially make my final model much more difficult to mould. I'm quite confident I could produce a more complex mould but it's more to do with the extra time it might take. I hope to pick my favourite poses out of these and draw over them to get a better idea of what the final model could potentially look like...

Head maquette

I started this maquette yesterday, trying to get a similar feeling to the simple plasteline figure's head. I developed the head further, putting in ear detail on the right hand side and some little teeth. I really like this design and hope to use this small model to help with colour tests or texture tests later on. I also want the final sculpt to have the same kind of forms as this one. The side profile is more appealing than the front at the moment so maybe this is something I might change in the sculpting process as well.

Mischevious character sketch

I drew this on Photoshop as a joke - but it actually captures a lot of the character of the Kijimuna that I want to get across in the final design. Sometimes the quickest, crappy sketches are the best! Also the pile of fish in front of him gives me an idea of how to present him at my end-of-year show...

Goblin thing

It's hard to imagine this one with a load of orange hair but I was looking at Lord of the Rings's Golem and liked the proportions and his build (or lack of it). This is a sketch of a more goblin-type face. I coloured it grey just to make it stand out from the background but Kijimuna's skin is often described as red coloured so it will not end up looking anything similar to Golem whatsoever. Also, to me, this looks a little more evil than I want this character to feel, Kijimuna often befriend humans in a lot of Okinawa's folk tales so I need to consider this in the design...

Face development

Now I've explored the shape of the body for a week, I'm focusing on it's face for most of this second week of the project. In the design maquette, the use of the Kijimuna's facial features and expression will be vital in communicating the creatures character and emotions - I want people to feel something for this character, if it's face is too alien, people will not be able to read and relate to it. To give it a more human look (without having to conform to generic face shapes too much) I have decided my version of the Kijimuna will have rounded-pupil eyes and similar teeth to that of a human.

Today I explored different facial features on a half-face mound of WED clay.
 (I use wed quite a lot for things I will be working on all day because of it's high glycerin content allowing it to stay moist for much longer than say, smooth buff. I used it for the project in my last blog: Capramostro and hope to use it for the final sculpt on this one.)
I tried to start off with a human-style face and took a front and 45 degree photo every time I changed the face significantly. Most of the changes were to the nose but the mouth, size and distance between the eyes differs also.

I'm not particularly warming to any of these variations right now but this photo evidence might be useful when I work on the face a bit more. I hope to produce a small bust maquette tomorrow based more on the simple plasteline figure posted earlier on.

Liquifying a design

Just getting used to some stuff in Photoshop like the liquify tool - the image above was a quick test I did. No. 1 is the original drawing and the other three are variations created using this tool. No. 3 is my favourite, the others just look distorted. The idea of having the eyes quite far apart is quite appealing so I might come back to this later...

Monkey face - in colour

First sketch I've coloured, thought I'd try a more ape-like face, but I don't want it to look too much like an existing creature and the nose is different than other ones I've looked at. I don't particularly like this one - I want the side profile to be more human than this.

WED clay sketching

This weekend I got some clay out and did a larger version of the plasteline maquette I did during the week but in a more crouched stance. I changed it a couple of times to see how little things about the pose can affect the feeling of the character. As I went along I couldn't help but block out muscles and tendons etc. I think having longer arms works quite well, especially taking into account that Kijimuna live in trees similar to a lot of primates who have lengthened arms...

Plasteline Sketch

This was my first dip into 3D designing - this was just to get an idea for how long I wanted the arms and legs to be etc... For this a used a very soft plasteline we had in stock at uni - its the same colour and softness as one of Jacobson's stuff that comes in a tube. I found I could work quickly with this before getting my hands covered in clay later on! This figure will probably end up being used as a 'pose' maquette to help me decide what position the final model will be in... The face was done quickly with a pencil and a bolt before I took any photos, but just from this, you can start to see the Kijimuna's character coming through.

First sketch (using guidelines)

Still getting used to the graphics tablet - this is a sketch I did over some proportion guidelines, at this point I haven't worked out what I want to do with the hands, feet or face - of course the hair will change the look of it quite a bit and I'm not sure what hair would be best but I included it anyway. I'm not too keen on the proportions, I think if the Kijimuna is also called 'bungaya' which means 'large-headed' then it should have a large head compared to it's body...

Later sketches will be influenced much more by things in nature that share this creature's environment and characteristics and I hope to take reference from books and the internet so the design is believable.

I e-mailed the god of creature design, Jordu Schell, today- we met at Monsterpalooza 2011 and I got to spend the day at his shop in LA repairing some of his old maquettes and chatting rubbish. I thought he could give me some pointers on designing a creature effectively, as he makes a living from this and holds courses on creature design on an international scale. He might not reply as he must get hundreds of e-mails a day but I thought I'd try anyway...

Pencil sketches update

I'm trying to do both manual and digital sketching, here's some more scans from sketchbook pages - this first image was two scribbles of a crouching pose and a Chinese-dragon style head, often people in manga and anime have small thin noses like Western people but I though it might look quite cool to give it a more Eastern look by widening the bridge of the nose and taking inspiration from Eastern culture...

I started to look at primate features today, the shape of the hands (that help with tree-living) and the arm proportions. Longer arms look like they would work and would fit with it's environment... I need to work a lot on how that would work in 3D but we'll see...

Looking at other creatures that spend a lot of time in trees, I like the look of sloth's 'claws' that they use to hang from branches - but Kijimuna are supposed to be expert fishermen and only eat the eyes of the fish they catch, so I thought I could merge a human hand with this claw to allow it to hang from branches easily and still be able to do fiddly things with proper digits...