Making Baskets/Bowls

I need a basket or a bowl of a proper size for the base of my ReaperCon piece. I have a couple of pre-made resin bowls, but they're too big. So today I worked on trying to make my own out of green stuff. I want a relatively small bowl or basket with a wide top that would be suitable for collecting change if you were a street performer.

I started with three balls of green stuff of different sizes. In the end I want a small bowl, but sometimes it's easier to start large.

I don't know how proper sculptors do this sort of thing, but I do sort of remember how to shape a bowl out of clay from art classes years and years ago. So I started by leaving one of the balls on the working area and trying to widen it out and form it into a bowl shape. Alternately, I know you can do it by starting with a flat bottom and building up coils in the shape you want. I tried both.

Neither was very successful. Trying to hollow out the shape on the tray left me a very rectangular profile and left a lot of texture on the bottom where the tools poked into the putty. The coils were better from a shape perspective (and more fun), but much harder to control. The coils also need to be kinda smushed together to make it look like a single item without weird gaps in the side.

I moved on to experimenting with shaping the bowl with the putty in my hand rather than on the work surface, and I think I had to most success with that. Here's what I was doing.

I started with a small ball of putty.

I used a conical clay shaper tool like this:

To start hollowing out the shape, I just stuck it into the ball of putty and worked it around in a circular motion.

I did this until I had a decent sized hole in the middle. Then I switched to a wider tool to continue making the shape I want. The wider tool also helped keep from leaving alot of marks in the bottom.

Once I had it about the size I wanted, I put it down on my work surface to make the bottom flat.

Then I used a wide, flat tool to square off the top edge by just lightly pressing the tool down across the whole top at once.

And that was that.These are all of my various attempts, with the ones made by the method I just detailed in the front.

I think one or two of those might be good enough for my use. I'll look closer tomorrow after they've had a chance to cure.

9!

Did the grub's base and put him together.

Grub: Done but for the Base

Finished up the grub itself today:

It's good enough for table top. He'd be fun to put out in a game.

He did come with a base;I popped him off of it to paint them separately. I've put the base coat on his base. I'll finish it up shortly and then put them back together.

Grub: Base Coat & Shading

I decided to work on something that I can do quick, and that will be something of a departure from what I have been doing lately. I was looking for something icky, gross, maybe a little evil, and non-humanoid. I found this guy.

I decided to go with a fleshy color. The reddish-purple shading does a nice job of making it looked inflamed and nasty, and hopefully when I get the highlights on there (they're going to be pale yellow) it'll be that but even more.

ReaperCon 2017

I will be at ReaperCon this year, October 19-22: https://reapercon.com/

I am teaching the following classes:

• Difficult Colors: Black, White, and Red
• Intro to OSL
• Painting Metal: NMM vs. TMM
• Freehand for the 2D Challenged
• Painting Modern Characters

If none of those suit you, there are a whole lot of other painting and sculpting classes available from other very talented instructors. If you can get to Dallas for a few days in October, it's definitely worth checking out.

Back from WME

World Model Expo was great. Busy, tiring, but great. I took some classes, saw some friends, and this happened:

That's a bronze for the diorama. Considering the level of competition, I'm very happy with that.

I have some commissions to work on for a while, so posts will be fewer for a few weeks. But I do intend to get back to finishing things that I left half done to concentrate on the diorama. It'll also be time to start on my ReaperCon piece soon. Here's a preview of that:

That's just the start of layout. It's going to be the dancing girl on some kind of cobblestone or maybe dirt street, with a bowl for collecting coins. I need to cut the base off her and get a bowl. That one came from the Twisting Catacombs scenery kickstarter, but it's too big. The thing has a diameter wider than her hips! So, I'll need to sculpt a bowl, probably. I also need to decide if that's the right size base.

Diorama: Done!

All done, and with almost a whole week to spare!

I don't anticipate doing another project of this size for a while. Glad I did it, learned a lot and I'm pretty happy with the result (though it has flaws that I'll need to keep in mind and address in the next one). But I'm looking forward to getting back to smaller, faster projects for a while.