It has been brought to my attention if you post to the blog on the older entries the posting doesn’t come through. Carin apparently has some kind of anti-spam program in place which causes this, sorry for the inconvenience. She said she'll look into it as soon as she can.
Here is another 1/48 German. In keeping with the idea of individualizing these figures he’s a bit taller, younger and more robust than the first two.
Here is another of the figures in the 1/48 WWII line. These first few are being made to hammer out the exact look of the line, the balance between realism, character and utility. For me this is the most technically demanding type of sculpting, which is why it appeals.
The mind is designed to perceive irregularity in context. Finding a wonky teacup in a jumble of crockery is difficult, spotting it when it’s laid out in a row of perfect ones is easy. As things become more correct smaller and smaller faults become noticeable because we see imperfections by contrast to the background. It’s a sort of feedback loop, the more exact you make the figure the more exact it must be. This cycle continues until the limit of perception is reached. Half the time spent sculpting a figure like this is in making it precise. With historical figures the challenge is even greater, since real rather than imaginary clothes and equipment must be depicted.
It follows naturally, most people can’t see the degree of precision until a figure is compared, side by side, with one not as precise, or with a photo of an actual person. The most sublime artifice is invisible.
This particular figure is an attempt to depict a more distinctive anatomy, a thin, wiry fellow and a continuing development of ways to depict the clothes so as to make them look lived in without striking the viewer as too odd. I’ve adjusted the helmet cover, for example to show the distinctive shape of the German helmet. In actual photographs the cover often tends to obscure but since the helmet shape is an important indicator I decided for the sake of character I should depict the cover in a way that makes the shape clear. The result is a cover which is still realistic but happens to show the shape better.
I should add - I know the helmet and smock get loops, they aren't on this model because it isn't done, these pictures were taken to show the client the size of the cast pieces I made, the gas mask holder, canteen, mess kit, shovel and grenades. I'll be adding the loops when I finish it.
Today’s picture is a figure in a new line of 1/48 WWII figures I’m making as a commission. The project is well funded and they’ve ordered about 60 figures to be made over the next three years. There will probably be enough for a release in about six months.
What makes historical figures like these interesting for me is the challenge of depicting nuances like fabric weight and texture and bringing out anatomy through modern clothes. 1/48 is a good scale, the size is big enough to do just about anything but still small enough to cast in a simple mold in two or three pieces at most. In this figure I particularly liked making the camo smock with it’s unusual seam placement.
The hands and rifle are a separate piece as is the trenching shovel, the head is turned so the mold seam will not fall on the face, he’s mounted on a bar for a slot base and would be about 1.41" (36mm) if he stood up straight, which makes him 5’8". Average height for this line will be about 5’9"
The design brief for these figures is for them to have individual character, this one in particular is a hardened veteran with elements of older and newer equipment issues.
Having recently received an e-mail with some questions about sculpting technique I thought I’d post the answers for anyone who might be interested, the specific questions refer to the third high elf archer.
"How do you armature your figures?
I generally use an armature I cast in metal myself. I don’t do this because it makes it easier to make correct proportions or control size but merely because it saves me the time of twisting wires and waiting for putty to set. It’s a mistake to think an armature will give you correct proportions, human joints aren’t simple enough for you to repose a simple wire or metal figure and keep things very precisely right, though you’d probably be close enough for a caricatured figure.
"(I) have a hard time keeping scale exactly consistent between figures."
That’s very common, I suspect it’s one of the main reasons behind ‘scale creep’ and why many people insist figure height should be measured to the eyes. The only advice I can give is to get a good set of calipers or a small micrometer and do a lot of measuring, eventually you will develop an eye for it and not have to measure so much, though you should always check your work. Many people seem to think they can learn to orient themselves in miniature without a solid, objective frame of reference. Perhaps they can but I suspect it takes a very long time. If you are making a lot of figures with the same proportions you might make yourself a tool with wires bent in ‘L’ shapes where the short arm of the ‘L’ is the length of the bones of the upper arm, lower arm and leg bones and compare these to the appropriate parts as you go along.
"How do you achieve … perfectly smooth scale-mail"
Well to start with it’s very important not to think of anything made by human hands like miniatures as perfect, there are only flaws below the threshold of perception. Either because they are so small the eye cannot resolve them or, more commonly, because the mind is not trained to perceive them.
I wouldn’t have said the unusual characteristic of my scale armor is smoothness so much as sharpness and resolution, also I try to give an impression of the shape of the body under flexible armor. Subtle effects like this are hard for the layman to pick out but add a lot to the overall impact even for people who couldn’t say why. It’s one of the things which makes realism so much more demanding than caricature.
As to how; most of it is having a complex understanding, a sophisticated model in my mind of the thing to be depicted, this comes from lots of study and thought. The only technique I can think of that helps is, when using Kneadatite (green putty) apply it only as thick as you need to for the depth of what you are sculpting. The thicker you put it on the more rubbery it will cure, sometimes this is a good thing but not for scale armor
".How did you do the cloak? The folds are flawless"
Again the cloak isn’t flawless, in fact it’s quite fanciful, a possible but unlikely dramatized deployment.
The procedure is easy. I set a number of fine brass wires in the back, bent them to follow the main folds I wanted to make, gave them a rough epoxy coat then, when that had set, a final finishing coat.
The essential thing is to understand what you are trying to get it to look like. The better you know this the more everything falls into place and, an essential when working in epoxy, the faster. In lots of ways Epoxy sculpture is like painting fresco.
"For the face…do you have any tips on how to improve them?"
For the most part my advice is a reiteration of what I’ve already said, know the subject thoroughly and don’t apply the putty too thick but in the case of faces I’d add keeping the bone structure especially in mind. A common fault in faces is to get the surface more or less right but fall down on the underlying structure, as I said before subtle effects can have a big impact, though the viewer frequently couldn’t tell you why. It is very easy to be lazy about faces because people will perceive a face easily, it’s instinctive in us, anything with eyes and a mouth in more or less the right place looks like a face, the more challenging thing is to make a face that people can continue to find character in the more they scrutinize.
"In what steps do you sculpt, do you do an entire leg at once, or the foot, then the pants, ect?"
I’m always changing the way I do things, partly to keep it interesting and partly to learn more but the most common way I make a 30mm sized figure is as follows:
First I bend the armature to the shape I want, then roughly fill in the body volumes, the chest cavity and skull and largest muscles with epoxy putty. Then I make whatever surface is deepest, so that succeeding applications of putty overlap previous work, whether I make the legs or the face next obviously depends on how the figure is to be dressed. Whenever I make symmetrical parts like legs or arms I make them both at the same time.
I’ve recently completed the three high elf archers for the December release so for today’s post a run through of the design ideas and characterization on which the elf figures are based.
The things which the appearance of all my elves have in common is a tolerance for asymmetry or odd, complex symmetries. I have only done a bit of this so far but I intend to do more, particularly for personalities. The only thing I can compare this to is some Japanese aesthetics. The ‘wonky’ looking (to western eyes) ceramics the Japanese go into raptures over for example. They use forms and motifs from the natural world as sigils and decorations as well as just wearing things like feathers, uncut gems, shells, leaves, or bits of animals. The sigils for wood elves are leaves, flowers and other plant parts. Leaves are protection and physical power and are generally worn by males, flowers are generation and some kinds of magical power and are generally worn by females. Sigils for high elves are from the sky and creatures of the sky, birds and flying insects, day for physical power night for magical. Obviously there is some abstraction for depicting concepts like light and vapor.
Aside from that I have a general convention of elves having tangled hair (elf-locks) and high elves having more sophisticated equipment and clothing. Wood elves wear a lot of leather, high elves a lot of silky stuff but both wear some of either. Wood elves tend to go abroad in high boots, high elves in low boots or shoes. Wood elves have a distinctive kind of cloak which is gathered at both top and bottom like the pleats in a curtain, it makes them look rather like they are in a pea pod. They also have a distinct kind of armor, a sort of tangled chainmail they sometimes wear. Elves prefer open helmets like a sallet, though they frequently wear decorated visors or masks.
In my view Elves shouldn’t have as much physical strength as a strong man but their dexterity and speed is much greater (goblins are the opposite, very strong but uncoordinated and slow) so they try to avoid protracted or close order melee and use light weapons which make the most of their advantages, light spear, light sword, bow.
By way of contrast I thought I’d write about a caricature piece I finished recently, to throw some light on the difference between composing a caricature and a realistic work.
Caricature, like realism seeks to communicate characteristics of a person or type of personality but differs in applying a formula of distortion, picking distinctive features and exaggerating them. In extreme form the effect is generally humorous and has been so employed from time immemorial. In the last century or so a sort of non-humorous, heroic caricature has become popular in comic books and the like. Illustration before the mid-twentieth century was broadly realistic or if caricature, humorous, so the development of heroic caricature is something new. Perhaps, as with the trend away from realism in fine art, it’s a reaction to photography or the technologies of mass reproduction.
The Napoleonic soldier caricatures I’ve made are meant to broadly follow the caricature formulas used by the well known caricaturists of the era, Gilray, Hogarth, Cruikshank ect. This formula uses some exaggeration of proportion, legs are either quite stout or absurdly thin, heads are a bit large, but not extremely distorted, facial features are exaggerated quite a bit and unlike many modern caricatures, there is no simplification but rather a lot of incidental detail. I adjusted this formula slightly in that I frequently chose features to exaggerate which are closer to modern character stereotypes than the way the Napoleonic caricaturists saw their subjects. This figure of Napoleon is a good example; he is generally characterized by English caricaturists of the time as a thin, hyperactive little man, a sort of militaristic Punch puppet. I chose instead to exaggerate brooding intellect (the set of the eyes and size of the forehead) egoism (the oversized hat and medals) and (popularly attributed) inferiority complex (overlong cloak, huge horse and high heels). For the face I chose distinctive features to exaggerate and enlarge at the expense of the more commonplace parts. Napoleon’s rosebud mouth, forehead, chin and lower jaw and to a lesser extent his nose, are all characteristic. One of the things which makes caricature so much easier than realistic sculpture is the degree of imprecision with which features and proportions can be depicted without in any way damaging the effect. It’s like fishing with explosives as opposed to a dry fly. To make a real portrait of Napoleon would require great exactitude and careful consideration, a caricature requires only a formula, simple choices and a few bold strokes.
I have to keep the pose simple because these figures must be robust and cast in a single piece since they are designed to be shot at with toy cannon. Napoleon is separate from his horse so he can be knocked off by a well placed ball.
I thought I’d go into a bit more depth about the wolf design as it seems I didn’t communicate very well and the question is an interesting and illustrative one.
The reason I’ve been rattling on about realism and caricature lately is connected to the wolf design. The problem was how to depict a goblin-wolf without departing from the realistic style of the elf figure line. There are several objections to making the goblin-wolf look exactly like a real one, some are practical, a real wolf for example, even a large one is realistically, too small to carry a creature bigger than a four year old child.
However the more difficult matter which raises the question of the border of caricature and realism is in depicting and differentiating the wolf as a wolf (and of what kind, there are many varieties and wide variation within them) and not a dog. In real life many people could not tell a wolf from a dog except by it’s behavior, those who could would rely on subtle visual clues which their mind would automatically accentuate without them realizing it, as in the earlier point in this blog about recognition of faces in different cultures. The question is how and how much can wolfish characteristics be ‘brought out’ before the figure becomes a caricature. The solution I proposed was not to depart plausibility (since this is a fantasy creature and not even meant to be a normal wolf) and to accent wolfish characteristics only for clarification and differentiation, not simply exaggerating for emotional impact. It’s a fine point but I think it can be found.
The fur is the most problematic point, ‘real’ fur cannot practically be sculpted or cast on this scale, there are many ways of suggesting fur, unfortunately some have the effect of making the animal look cute and cuddly, others, perhaps the most ‘realistic’ ones do little to differentiate the wolf from a dog. One of my chief concerns was not to make something which looked like a shaggy German Shepherd (or Alsatian to our cousins in the U.K.) so I chose a bit more stylization than I would generally use. The result is a "fairy-tale wolf" but not an impossible beast and no one could mistake it for a dog or a hyena or, on seeing it, call it anything but a wolf though it is not exactly like one in many points of detail. The idea, put simply, was to make a wolf that looks a bit more like a wolf than a wolf does but not to the point of cartoon.
Perhaps just a bit more explanation of what I mean by ‘realism’ and ‘caricature’ as those words apply to miniatures is in order. By ‘realism’ I don’t mean a figure made just as if it were scanned by a holographic scanner and printed by a 3-D prototype originator, I don’t even mean trying to make a figure to look like that. Realism as it applies to miniatures is less a matter of adhering to the actual point-by-point features of a thing and more why you depart from the actual features.
Aside from technical reasons such as making a model which can be reproduced or exaggerating resolution because of small size, the only reason realism allows for departure from the actual is clarification, and while actuality may be modified for clarity the boundary of possibility is never breached. Exaggeration or distortion is never used for characterization as in caricature, character must be portrayed using only real or, in the case of imaginary creatures, plausible elements. Obviously, eschewing the broad strokes of caricature makes communication more difficult, more subtle, but for this very reason the possible range of expression is greater.
I don’t mean to say realism has a blanket superiority to caricature, it depends entirely on what you are trying to do. Caricature is better for humor, particularly satire, it also makes a less ambiguous, elementary communication which requires less shared cultural experience between the artist and the audience. This is why caricature and stereotype are so commonplace in art designed for mass consumption. In the mass media caricature and hyperbole are so ubiquitous they are generally not even recognized as such.
I should probably have made clear the underlying design assumptions of the figure line of which the wolf will be part. They are, along with the figure’s small size, the need to make a model which can be economically produced and the impression the sculpture is meant to convey, core constraints on how the figure is designed.
The 30mm line is meant to be ‘realistic’ fantasy. The charm of this idea is in the contradiction of fantastical creatures realistically and rationally presented. It’s an old idea, going back at least to Swift, though in his case it served for political and cultural satire. It’s the opposite of the caricature style which relies on exaggeration and uses the absurd, distorted, misconstructed and impossible as a matter of course for artistic effect.
In the realistic style the problem is to get the maximum expression within the constraints of a realistic, rational presentation. Imagination is held under tension and tends to resolve into greater subtlety. The work must be observed closely, unraveling the finely constructed elements is the charm. Caricature by contrast, uses invention to confront, surprise and instantly impress the viewer with one exaggeration playing off another for compounded effect. There is a good analogy to music where realism is like the discipline of Baroque or Classical construction and caricature is more like the free form of pop music.
I thought I’d give a rundown of my approach to sculpting using a recently completed figure as an example, while it’s still pretty fresh in my mind. Not to show how to push putty around but the decisions made about how I want the result to look.
In this case it’s a wolf for the goblin line.
The first question to resolve is how to depict fur. Long, deep fur with guard hair, like that of a wolf is something which calls for a lot of stylization in a small sculpture. Make it anything close to a realistic depiction of the surface, what a scanner would pick up and it’s very plain on this scale, that is to say it doesn’t do much to communicate anything you might like to bring across about a wolf such as power, ferocity or menace. You are left with the head and the pose to give the entire impression and I don’t think that’s enough so I’m going to stylize heavily (for this line) and make the fur in tightly grooved panels of varying lengths to better show the wolf’s anatomy and give it a wild, mangy look.
The physique of an actual wolf is pretty skinny which won’t do for the desired impression so he must be pumped up but I think this can be done without departure from actual wolf anatomy, and certain wolf characteristics, like big feet and stilted front legs can be retained or even tweaked for extra wolfish-ness. The focus of menace has to remain, as in a real wolf, on the head and eyes, so how the head is held, (in this case low, with a snarl and flattened ears) the neck ruff, leg positions and set of the shoulders all focus attention on the head, which I make a bit small proportionally, to emphasize the bulk of the body, the way a large or over-muscled man’s head looks slightly small. I try to strike a balance, because this line is not about caricature and I don’t go for an over-the-top pose because this wolf is a grunt, snarling and yapping but just a line trooper, not a soloist.
The face, of course gets special attention, elements which are more characteristic of wolf are emphasized, particularly the set of the fur, those which are dog-like toned down. Because the figure is so small I reduce the number of teeth and make them somewhat larger, to stand out from a distance. I anthropomorphize the planes of the head ever-so-slightly, to make the emotion more recognizable and give the wolf a look more appropriate to a semi-intelligent fantasy creature.
I’ve been drown in busywork (cleaning master sets and making molds for the long-delayed releases) and attending Gencon for the last few weeks so I haven’t had time to add to the blog. Gencon was a lot of fun this year and I met several people who were kind enough to say they enjoyed my ramblings. I was there with two of my nephews and a niece and their youthful reaction to the hobby, with which they aren’t overly familiar, was quite a tonic.
Continuing the thread of sculpting, I thought I’d expand on the answer I gave to Mathieu’s question about the definition of the words ‘art’ and ‘craft’ and their significance.
In my own view ‘art’ is anything done with discretion, that is, with a decision being made by the person making it, which is not useful for some other end than esthetic, in other words the decision serves no other purpose. So painting a figure would be art if the painter decided what colors to use and how to go about it, but filling out a pre-set pattern in needlepoint or assembling a jigsaw puzzle is not. Likewise sculpting a figure with discretion is art, while with a lot of the toy work I do, my contribution is just mechanical craft because I am aiming at limiting my discretion as completely as possible, ideally the final product should be indistinguishable from anyone else’s who contributed to the toy line.
As to what makes a work of art better or worse than another, I’d say there are several factors, but just because art is badly done, requires little skill or is trite, it does not devolve to craft, it’s still art as long as the maker has discretion to decide how it’s done and the end is esthetic. Craft is when the maker has little or no discretionary input, in that case, though the task may require great skill, it is craft.
Some of the factors by which art is valued are objective or nearly so; the work could fall short of the artists intent through failure of technique, skill or other resource, but many more are subjective. There is a certain amount of chicanery and more than a little pretension in the world of art. In the last two hundred years or so art criticism has, for whatever reason, been modeled on the rise of science and so the history of art has been constructed into the history of a developing advancing and expanding corpus of understanding. I think this is a mistaken conception. In my view art is more like fashion. Is an Armani suit a more ‘advanced’ garment than a toga? Not objectively, it depends how you look at it.
Part of this ‘advancing’ model of art criticism is to impose value on past works to the degree they exemplify ideas which are supposed to be a higher evolution than the ideas they replace. So we get in modern times the absurdity of art which has no charm but is valued entirely because of ideas it is purported to exemplify which have an advanced place on the imaginary continuum of value. To put it in terms of fashion it’s as though the self-consciously sophisticated began wearing burlap sacks because some fashion critic developed a theory that coarse fibers represented the freeing of repressed instincts and shapeless drapery was the highest expression of self-actualized awareness.
In a way the world of high art is another example of a social model based on a corrupted and misconceived application of Darwin’s ideas about evolution in nature. Art does evolve but evolution is not a synonym for advance, it’s just adaptation to change in the environment.
With proper motivation and flexible conceptualization, the other foundation in my view of how to think about sculpture is to approach learning with the aim of getting definite, useful feedback. If you can get truly empirical feedback (by measurement of some kind) that’s best but if not, break down what you are trying to learn into digestible chunks. When I used to try and instruct other sculptors at Ral Partha I would say, just doing a complex complete work and then trying to figure out where it went wrong is like turning off the lights and throwing darts at a target then switching the lights back on to see how you did. You may become more accurate but it will take a much longer time. Ideally you should examine discreet aspects of how you do what you do.
This approach requires patience and an imagination narrowly directed and controlled rather than floating free. There is a time to let your fancy romp and a time to harness it to solving problems. By this I mean instead of summoning images of a really cool new design for a spikyskull-- Cirque du Soleil - levitating -cyberzombie - anti-anti-paladin - succubus with big hooters and steam power armor, tune it down to just imagining, very thoroughly, what happens to the cloth in the sleeve of a coat as you move your arm. Concentrate on the feel of the fabric, how the stiffness, weight, grain, seams and the anatomy it covers affect the wrinkles. Then channel it down to just one wrinkle, exactly how and why it folds the way it does. If you make a whole figure and then study how it can be improved you may learn something - like the darts thrown in the dark, but if you study just one wrinkle thoroughly you will learn a lot more.
I use the word error here for things which the artist did not intentionally do and which he would change if he realized he had. For example it may not be an error to make a figure of a young woman with absurdly long legs but it would usually be an error to make one arm longer than the other unless she were deformed or a zombie or something.
The way we construct what we have seen in our minds is the ultimate source of many of the problems people have sculpting figures. Generally when I see instruction or advice about sculpting it addresses common errors individually, pointing out that the lower arm is actually shorter than the upper, or explaining how the shoulder girdle works in terms of mechanical devices like hinges. I don’t think this approach will get you very far. If you want a thorough understanding you must be able to examine, experiment and refine different ways of translating what you see into sculpture.
For example, the common model taught for the elbow joint is a hinge. Of course if you are making anime figures or the like, a sophisticated model of the elbow is not required but for more realistic figure styles this analogy, taken too literally, leads to errors I have seen again and again.
You could simply refine your model of a hinge to include a flange at the end and mount it in the middle of the arm (for some reason many people seem to think the pivot occurs close to the outside point) which would be a kind of correction but In my view you are better off dispensing with it and thinking about the elbow joint in completely different analogies. Balls rolling against each other or two sticks with rounded ends held together by a tight rubber tube.
Let me give an example from my own experience. Not long after I had decided to make sculpting a serious career choice I had a commission to make a dolphin. I couldn’t get the head to look 'right'. I had an array of source material, photos of dolphin heads from every conceivable angle but I just couldn’t get it. Then I realized if I thought of the head shape in terms of function, that it must have the forehead dome for sonar, the jaw must work to catch fish and the eye placement a balance between maximum field of view and protection of the eye, while the whole must be streamlined, the shape fell into place. I saw that it must be just so for it’s purpose and I was able to make a head which finally struck me as right. That’s not to say it was correct, it was a simplified approximation in terms of function but I think someone looking at it might see, consciously or unconsciously how the function of the head was being depicted and this would strike them with something I call, for lack of a better word, ‘charm’.
Human perception does not work like a camera, our minds see both less and more than is there. We see what our past experiences have conditioned us to expect and perceive parts only in their relation to the whole. This must be kept in mind because it effects not only how the finished work impresses others but how the artist absorbs and manipulates the impressions out of which he creates the work.
For example; a photograph or a hologram preserves an image of a thing, indiscriminently point by point but a person receives it as a group of impressions connected to other impressions in the web of their memory, more like a verbal decription. A stereotypical example of this is the perception of Europeans who are not used to seeing Orientals that they look alike. Points of focus Europeans are accustomed to use as reference like hair color and texture, eye color and some facial planes are not much differentiated in most Orientals. Orientals, who look for different visual clues probably find European faces confusing.
The use of objective reference material and other tools can confine this translation by the mind to a narrower range, but to the degree human hands shape the model it will be there. This mental translation is what gives art it’s charm. Whatever you regard visual art as communicating about the mind or reality, it is in this act of translation.
I’ll try to give an example; Three guys are taking an art class, sculpture 101, an engineer, an embroiderer and a stone mason. They go to the zoo to sculpt an elephant. The engineer analyses how the elephants’ weight is distributed, what internal structures support it, how forces are exerted through the body to make the animal move. The embroiderer focuses on the wrinkles and convolutions of the elephant’s hide, the placement of surface features and their expression. The stone mason is most impressed with the volumes that make up the shape of the elephant and how they are arraigned relative to one another.
Each, of course, had all the elements of the others, the engineer’s elephant had skin and the embroiderer’s had structure, but each artist focuses the image through the lens of their mind in a different way.
Like the blind men of Hindoostan, each has a quite different animal none of which is more right or wrong than the others and each of which has it’s own charm because of the translation their differently trained minds have imposed on it. This example is rather crude and obvious but the principle is subtle and must always be borne in mind. From what I’ve seen, most amateur artists make this translation unconsciously, which can result in some very interesting work but real mastery requires awareness.
A word on today’s picture. This is a Napoleonic caricature designed to look like the satirical cartoons of that period. I made it a while ago during some dead time waiting on instructions for a toy commission. If it looks a bit slapdash compared to my usual work bear in mind it’s a bit less than two inches tall and only took about eight hours to make.
When Carin started this weblog and suggested I should write reviews and such it didn’t make much sense to me. What people come here for is to see my sculptures, so what I should write about is sculpture.
But that’s difficult, there are plenty of how-to-sculpt in epoxy articles on the web and most of them are as good as anything I could write. In any case, knowing how to use the materials alone won’t get you far, what really matters is how you think about sculpting.
From time to time I have been asked to teach sculpting or supervise other sculptors but it has never worked very well. I don’t exactly know why, part of the problem certainly was my difficulty dealing with other people’s emotions. I find a lot of sculptors motivation is very personal and so they associate their work with themselves. Tell them their work has a fault and you are telling them they are faulty, in extreme cases I’ve seen this to such a degree that anything less than praise and enthusiasm about their work will make them think you don’t like them personally.
This sort of thing certainly makes instruction difficult but my more important failing is the seeming inability to communicate thinking about sculpture. People seem to get the idea I’m going all mystical and fuzzy when I think I’m being quite plain and rational.
But it’s got to be more interesting than my reviews so here goes.
First, a general point about motivation.
You aren’t going to get far if you are motivated by other people’s praise or enjoying thinking of yourself as something special because of what you do. Motives like these interfere with clear thinking and are silly in any case. You are the same person with the same value no matter what you do or what people say about you, other people’s opinions don’t change what you are. Comparing yourself to others may be a very common, even instinctive drive in humans, witness all the tests we take which tell us nothing useful about ourselves but only how we rank with others who have taken the test. You have to really get it through your head and deep down into the core of your being; this sort of thing is absurd and counterproductive. If you want to become really good at anything you have to want to do it for it’s own sake and not for some other end. That’s not to say you can’t enjoy sharing your work but you should share it the way you’d share some food you like, and not regard it as having any bearing on your own or the other's value if they don’t like the taste.
And a caveat.
This is how I think about sculpting, not how everyone should. People’s minds work differently and that’s a good thing, how boring life would be if it weren’t so. Pick over what I write and choose any insights that appeal without feeling any obligation to swallow the whole thing, or, heaven forbid, make some kind of system out of it.
Next time I baby-sit I’ll try to make an actual start.
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