Hylonome

I came across the next sculpture I want to do. She is a member of the Kentaurides (or Centaurides). This is a female Centaur. her name is Hylonome. 

Thought process

I imagine her as a pearly white horse with the beautiful blonde woman for the torso. I want her to have long curly hair down to her belly button. This could be a challenge to sculpt but lets see, I’m determined to get it right. It is said that she twirls flowers in her hair. She uses violets, rosemary, roses and white lilies.

It is also said that she attended the battle against the Lapiths. Therefore I want her wearing armour in which case I’ll give her a weapon as well. I will have her holding a bow and arrow with a bunch of arrows strapped in a holder on her back. She will also have a sword in its sheath which will be strapped to her horse body. I might give the horse part armour as well. If I do I will just have to decide how and where it will go. I imagine the armour as bright, shiny silver.

I can’t wait to design the armour. I want it to have beautiful, intricate designs. She will have a breast plate, gauntlets and a beautiful circlet on her forehead.

I have decided that I want her bow and arrow to have the designs of the flowers that she has in her hair on it. This will personalize her weapon and also give it an element of beauty. 

Research


Today I researched horse and human anatomy in order to assist me in creating my armature. For this piece I will simply curve the bottom of the spine of the human outwards to connect to the natural curve of the horse's spine.

I also researched archery and the correct stance for archers to stand in and at what angle they should hold the bow etc. I found this rather interesting.

For the first time in forever I actually picked up a pencil and scribbled, rather badly, my ideas for her bow and arrow. I am super excited about this, I plan to have it incredibly detailed even though the bow is only about 5mm wide in its widest parts. I don't even know how I'm going to hold this! Wish me luck.

Sculpting


Today I began building my armature for Hylonome.  I am taking my time with this one and making it super strong so that I do not have another Medusa disaster. I also need a strong armature because of the position of Hylonome. I am sculpting her rearing up on her two hind legs. Since her horse section is long and leaning forward I need to ensure that I have incredible strong hind legs and pelvis area so that it wont collapse when I add the clay.

To do this I took 5mm thick threaded rod and hammered it into the shape of the legs, with the assistance of my mommy :), I then did the same with the spine. Next I drilled holes in a piece of wood and bolted the threaded rod into the wood. I then took wire and wrapped it around these pieces to connect them all to each other like a pelvis does. I wrapped it super tight so none on the pieces move when I apply pressure to them. Then for extra strength I covered the pelvic area with two part putty that is said to set like steel. I am currently waiting 24hours to ensure that it has set properly before I continue.

Tomorrow I will build the front legs of the horse with wire. I put two part putty over this as well. Once dry I  will wrap plaster band aid over the entire thing.

Today I attached the tail and front legs to my armature. I did this out of wire and then covered the entire thing in two part putty. I am now just waiting for the putty to set properly before I cover the entire thing in plaster band aid.

I discovered a useful tip. The strength of your armature is greatly increased when you take 3 days to complete it rather than 3 hours.

I have finally finished my armature and begun sculpting. It was rather amusing to see my armature covered in plaster bandage, it made it look like a bald rat.

 I am so super excited about this piece, especially the horse section purely because of the beautiful muscular structure of the horse. Unfortunately working on Hylonome has been a bit slow these past few days and will continue to be slow for the next week due to the Easter holidays and having guests over etc.

I managed to squeeze in a bit of sculpting today. I have almost completed the horse's basic muscle structure. Soon I will be able to perfect it by adding the tendons and detail.

I have discovered that I will need to sculpt and mould her bow and arrow before I can sculpt her hands. This is because the bow and arrow will be incredibly delicate and tiny, therefore it will be easier to mould separately. Once moulded I will then have a solid bow and arrow to work with and build her hands around.

I managed to squeeze a few hours of sculpting in today. Started sculpting the bow and arrow. I am extremely excited about its progress it's really looking awesome. It is my most detailed piece yet. Unfortunately I have to take more regular breaks though because I'm focusing on such a tiny area that I get headaches and nausea. Can't wait to post pics!

I am officially half way through the bow. Due to it having detail on both sides I decided to start from the very tip, work my way down to the middle then turn it over and do the same on the other side. Since the bow needs its string attached at the tips I decided to incorporate it into the design rather than having notches cut out of the edges. To do this I sculpted a rose at each end and then the green leaves of the rose stand outwards so that the string will tie around between the rose bud and the leaves.

I am now nearly done with the bow. There is only about 3cm left in the middle to sculpt. Things are becoming tricky now due to lack of space to hold the bow and sculpt without damaging any detail. Due to the fact that I have started with detail on the other end, I can no longer set it down without damaging it. I therefore decided to tie a slipknot (not the metal band) with string around the center of the bow and suspend it from a wooden plank that I keep on top of a box. I keep the plank far enough over the edge of the box to allow the bow to spin and move around without getting damaged by knocking the sides.

I have decided that I will rest the bow on tissues in the fridge for a few minutes to harden the clay so that if I do accidentally touch the already sculpted detail, there is less chance of it being damaged. I haven't quite decided how I will sculpt the last centimeter of the bow yet but when I figure it out I will update my blog. This might take a bit of luck!

I will finish her bow today and take it for moulding tomorrow. Yay exciting!

Completing the sculpting of the bow wasn't all that difficult. All I did was gripped the center of the bow with a pair of long nose pliers and sculpted around it. This left only a few millimeters left to sculpt where the pliers had been so I set the bow down carefully on a pile of tissues and finished off the last detail.

This is Hylonome's completed bow.

Hylonome's arrow on the other hand is a different story. First step is to get your piece of wire perfectly straight. This is harder than it sounds. First attempt with my bare fingers failed. Second attempt with the hammer failed worse. Third time lucky I decided to squash the wire repeatedly in the vice grip. This also ended up texturing the wire nicely allowing the clay to grip to the texture rather than just smooth wire. I Then took a wider set of pliers to straighten out any minor kinks. This worked really well. My wire was still not perfect and to test how straight it was i placed it on the table and gently rolled it with my fingertips. At first it didn't roll so I straightened it out more now just with my fingers. I kept doing this and eventually my piece of wire rolled easily. It was now straight as an arrow and ready for clay.

I rubbed a small amount of clay onto the wire and kept rolling it on the table to keep it straight and even. Once this was done i began working on the arrow head. I decided to make the arrow head the shape of a lily with a sharpened edge. This is looking really great with the bow.


I continued working on the horse anatomy of Hylonome today. I am paying special attention to the muscle detail here. I really want to perfect this piece. I spent all day sculpting each and every muscle and tendon and am almost complete with the one side.


I find it helps to take photos of your sculpture. This aids in showing you the imperfections like it has shown me that the chest of the horse needs to be deeper. I will do this tomorrow. Another thing that taking pictures helps with is symmetry. It is really difficult to get the one side looking like the other especially when you can't see both sides at the same time. Therefore I will take a picture of the completed side, put it on my computer and flip it over so that it indicates what the other side should look like. I then print this out and use it as reference for the other side.

Today I finished off the muscle of the other side of the horse and began the human part. This was really interesting because at first I started sculpting the human part facing forward and then I decided to see exactly what each muscle does in the archer pose. So I went and had photos of my self in the pose taken and realised before I even looked at the photos that I was sculpting her all wrong.

I realised that her body wont face forward, it actually faced the side. This is because as soon as you pull your arm back extending the string of the bow, your back muscles twist, turning your body to the side. At first I thought I was standing wrong so I repositioned myself standing forward then pulled my arm back and my body twisted. I found this seriously interesting.

I went back to my sculpture and repositioned her. I had the photos taken from every possible angle so I can turn my sculpture with the photos accordingly to make sure I get the anatomy exact. This method is very advisable and also interesting. Just because you sculpt something from one angle and get it looking perfect, doesn't mean that the other side will even look human. Therefore I keep turning it and sculpt each side over and over until all sides match up perfectly. I am still currently working on this.

From now on I would definitely advise people to actually go and stand in the position that their sculpture is to stand in even if it isn't human, just so you can feel how your muscles move into the position. Doing this saved my sculpture.

Hylonome's anatomy is really looking awesome if I may say so myself. I'm really proud of myself. I have never spent so much time just on anatomy but it is so worth it. It has made a major improvement to my sculpture. 

Tomorrow I will start on her face and by Sunday or latest Monday I will begin her hair. I was going through the work of my favourite artists on Deviant art and got permission to use the super amazing hairstyle of My Batty Psyche created by My Ambeon. I'm so excited I can't wait to get started!

So today I started working on the face and hair. I got pretty far. The face took up most of my day but I managed to get the basic shape on the hairstyle on as well. I'm really excited to finish these parts as soon as possible because I can't wait to get what's in my mind out in 3D form. However I also want to take time really paying attention to detail and perfecting the face, and hair too, but the face in particular is a challenge.

This is only my second human face but i find that with each face I've done it starts out looking extremely alien. This is because of the shape of the head. I obviously made it too oval. I fixed this by adding to the forehead and brow.

Hylonome now looks human, yay! The only problem now is she looks like a mixture of Asian and Egyptian. Not that I have a problem with either race but I planned to make Hylonome blonde which won't quite work if her face looks Asian/Egyptian.

I figured that this was mostly due to the shape of the eyes. I struggled with this for quite some time and eventually got her resembling an Asian/Egyptian version of Dakota Fanning. Odd I know. I think the Dakota resemblance is due to her cheeks.

On the plus side she is slowly getting there. I will try my best to perfect her face tomorrow so that I can work on the detail of the hair. Part of me is really tempted to do the hair first and then finish off the face. The only problem with this is that it leaves less place for me to hold while I work on the face. Yes? No? Yes? No? Decisions decisions. I do however have a sneaky suspicion that temptation will get the best of me.

Just as I suspected I let temptation guide me to her hair first. I completed her hairstyle today and am very happy with how it is looking. All that is left to do to her hair is add the flowers into it. Cannot wait to do this! I will start and hopefully finish this tomorrow. I will be so tempted to post pictures of this as soon as I finish however temptation won't grasp me in its clutches this time purely because I can't show the hair without showing her face and her face isn't ready to be revealed yet. She is still in desperate need of a nose and lip job and general eye and face lift.

Due to her hair coming down past her belly button I will also need to complete her armour on her torso before photos can be revealed. Temptation might get the better of me here but I'm really reluctant to reveal anything incomplete. It's a perfectionist issue.

So today I decided to redo her hair. It just wasn't good enough. I'm super glad that I did though because now it looks loads better. The hundreds of tiny flowers in her hair just make it something special. 

Tomorrow I will begin and hopefully complete her face. I will spend all day on it if I have to because I am determined to get the perfect face.

Woo hoo done with the face. Now just to add her circlet and her armour and then I will post some sneak peak photos. I'm predicting that this will be done by the end of tomorrow. Definitely by Thursday.

Designing her armour may be a tad tricky since I am very happy with her anatomy I don't want to cover it up too much with armour so I will some how have to design it so that it reveals enough anatomy detail but not too much.  

So I completed Hylonome's circlet today. Unfortunately I am rather ill today so I only made it half way through her armour however I am pretty certain that I will complete it by tomorrow so I will be able to post images finally! 

Okay so I've been working on the front of the horse. This has actually been more difficult than expected I made the discovery as to why. This may seem obvious but it wasn't to me until I was actually working on it. I got loads of reference pictures of all different angles of horses which was great. The problem was that I got a whole bunch of different breeds of horses.

This became a problem because I would sculpt with one breed from the side and then turn it to the front to sculpt the chest from a completely different breed. I don't know much about horses so I didn't think it would be a problem because to me a horse is a horse, but think about it this way. If I were sculpting a dog and sculpted the side of a Great Dane and then used a Saint Bernard for reference for the chest I would have a huge problem because I would have a huge broad chest with tall narrow legs which would just look weird.

This is the exact problem I had with the horse piece. Anyway I fiddled around and fixed it up but I will definitely remember this as a good tip for next time.

After I completed the horse's chest and front legs I decided to go back to her face. I was on twitter and came across an amazing figurine sculptor and the faces of his characters are insane! So I decided I have to be just as good and I won't mould this piece until I am. So I went back and started the face over. I spent the entire day, in a bad mood, just sculpting her eyes. This was a mission and just kept upsetting me but eventually I got it right... or so I thought.

She was looking alright from the front but whenever I turned her to the side she would just look odd. Her face hardly looked human and was very flat looking. So I went to bed, woke in the morning and decided that this just wouldn't do so yet again I started over.

This time I got it right, yay! It is looking great and isn't taking that long. Previously I tried looking at reference pictures and other people's sculptures but this wasn't working for me and I realised that the reason her face was looking flat from the side was because I was looking at reference pictures. Flat images on paper.

I therefore decided to go grab a mirror. There I sat staring at myself in the mirror and pulling faces at myself to see how my muscles move with each expression. not only was I watching myself in great interest in much the same way that a baby watches itself when it discovers a mirror for the very first time, but I also started feeling my face and measuring parts to see what matches up where. This may have looked ridiculous but it saved my sculpture. Her face now looks real from all angles.

Here's a breakdown of how I sculpted the face. First of all I took off her circlet and made her forehead a lot rounder. This made her look much less as if she had been banging her head against the wall repetitively. I then sculpted her eye brows and the area above her eyeballs. After staring at myself and feeling around I discovered that this area is way more fleshy than I thought. Previously I was sculpting it quite concave.

Another mistake that I made previously was I sculpted the eyelids first then the brow and then the eyeball. This didn't work and took forever because I kept damaging the lids, fixing the lids and damaging the eyeballs, fixing the eyeballs while damaging the lids. vicious circle.

This time I began with the brow area and then the eyeball. I built up the eyeball until it looked as if she had her eyes closed. Notice that weather your eyes are open or closed they always have the same shape. So I made sure that I got this shape correct.

Finally I added the top eyelid quickly and easily. Before adding the bottom lid I turned her to the side to check out her profile and realised that the bone that lies on the outer edge the eye was too shallow so a built it up a bit. I also built up the muscle that joins the upper cheek to the nose just under the eye. Only after I had the correct muscle and bone structure all around the eye area did I add the bottom lid. This, like the top lid, went quick and easily.

I then worked my way down the face, building up the cheeks and eventually I made my way to her jaw bone. Now that I have the correct face structure on the one side, I will sculpt the other side to match and finally I will sculpt her nose and mouth. I will do this tomorrow. 

(more coming soon, busy sculpting.)