I am finishing up illustrating The Three Little Aliens and the Big Bad Robot so I decided to finish working on a sculpture of the main characters. Well, I got one of them done, and I’m not sure I’ll have time to sculpt the other two.
This is one of the main characters. He’s definitely going to be the valedictorian of his class some day. I did kind of a ‘hero’ sculpt of him. It’s not a direct copy of a pose in the story. But he is holding a solar panel which he procures during the story. Creating the sculpture of the character definitely helped bring him to life for me.
About the Statue
It was done using sculpy clay and in order to stay as true as I could to the drawn character I had to sculpt it in two pieces. The characters legs are so thin and small they could not support his upper torso. Sculpy isn’t strong enough to support the upper half of his body until after you bake it. (sculpy is clay-like until you bake it for 30 minutes and then it firms up)
I baked the legs and base as a single piece and I built a stand with a wire armature to support the torso and baked that as a second element. I created a peg system so the bottom fit into and under the torso. His pants slipping under his long shirt/coat as you can see in the picture below.
Once they were cooked and cooled, I glued them together, did a little clean up with files and x-actos, painted him completely with white paint to get a uniform undercoat, then painted his colors using a mix of acrylics and animation cell paint.
And the Winner Gets -
I am planning on having some kind of contest on this blog when the book comes out and will give this statue out as the prize. So you will hear more about it before then. I’ll try and get the other two characters done before the book launches.
