Started today posting video progress of some of my work for the Traces Retraced film, this one a Sketching a Character non digital process, in YouTube. It is always fun to see the final product, but the traditional process is more satisfactory than the digital versions. This version of Isidro eventually died and a younger more energetic, albeit naive, Isidro was born in Blender.

Why Sketching a Character on Clay?

As I trained in the traditional form of art education, my hands are faster and more accurate working on clay while coming up with ideas for the design of a character. When I used to teach art in public schools and college I would stress to my students to always pursue traditional training options and even after school, to find groups that would continue their own educations in together using traditional methods. I would tell them, “leave the computer and mobile devices on the table and get your hands dirty!”

Now, there are two types of clay that I use, this regular kind, that can be use for ceramics if you prepare it a bit, and bake it in a kiln, and my favorite now, more malleable and less stress on it drying on you, Roma Plastilina. Roma comes in multiple levels of stiffness, or softness depending how you see it.

The process of sketching a character.

First, you set up the base. Use metal water pipes to build the skeleton of the subject in the pose you want, with the help of sculpting wires. They come, also, in various malleable densities and of course lengths. When you have the skeleton ready, you apply whichever clay you picked, but you need to make experimentation to see how much of each you need to keep it from turning on you when detailing the parts. With regular clay, it can get too wet and just fall off the wire, or too hard and not stick to the wire. With Roma it can be so hard that when you apply clay around a wire, you don´t noticed you left a pocket of air between the clay and the wire. So, patience, test and test, and when you find your amount, stick to it – no pun intended.

Then comes the fun part. Block all the shapes and masses, no worrying about details, just proportion. Then when you are satisfied with the proportions, start doing simple detailing of wide areas. Do not get into the finer details. It is easy to get lost in the details. I never spend too much time in one part of the subject. I keep moving all around it, and literally around, since it is a sculpture and you get to see it from multiple points of view, which is the point of the exercise.

When the general details are in place, you start the finer ones, again, not spending too much time in one spot. Go around it, look at it every time you make a change. The power of this process of sketching a character is to see that what might have been a “great mental idea” is not that good in reality and vice-versa. Some times, the accidents of not achieving what you want is exactly what you needed on that sketching to make your subject what it needs to be for the matter at hand.

Then, sketching a character on the computer is faster.

Once you see your character in clay, whichever you used, the computer process is less tedious because the technical parts of the computer will not get on the way of your creativity. One of the problems of current artists is that they get distracted or disturbed while in the process of creation because technology is unpredictable and when it will break, it does not announce it.

Blender has a sculpting feature or module (yes, I am from the old guard) and makes a good replacement for clay, but you are still at the mercy of the computer or the software not working as planned, or the electricity going out on you, or one of the tools needed to use the computer (keyboard, mice, etc.) breaking. Do yourself a favor, and find traditional ways, non technological, to do your creating and then use the computer for the construction part.