Maquette Attempt 1
I used to be ok at this
I don’t have any digital sculpting skills, so I’ll physically sculpt this plant home. I probably could’ve learned digital sculpting in the 1 ½ years since my last post. Instead, I was chasing a bunch of other squirrels; more on that later.
Before I do the full-sized sculpt, I’ll test out a style concept or two by creating tiny plant homes. Tiny homes are trending now, right? These preliminary mini sculptures are usually called “maquettes,” the French word for “model.” They differ from prototypes in that prototypes are for testing the function of a design, whereas maquettes usually focus on style and aesthetics. I took a stab at sculpting a mini version of the planter to test a styling concept with clay and 3d printed parts. The results were an abomination. My sculpting skills were never on par with Michelangelo’s, but I had hoped to recall a modicum of the sculpting skills I had back in college. Below are images of Paul Winston, an animatronic cigarette I sculpted/built in college. I need to find these skills again.
Disgruntled Cigarette Maquette
Full Sized Face Sculpt Progress
Full Sized Face Sculpt Progress
Cigarrette's Teeth Sculpted, Cast & Installed
Complete Cigarette; Paul Winston; 2ft Tall
Disgruntled Cigarette Maquette
Baby Steps
In a single sculpting session where I attempted to model a tiny plant home, the results went from bad to worse. I tried a sculpting clay I had never used before called Fixit Sculpt. Crafsman, one of my favorite YouTubers, uses Fixit Sculpt and its sister product, Apoxie Sculpt, to create his own figures, so I was inspired to try it. Fixit Sculpt is a 2-part epoxy clay that you mix equally to activate. Once mixed, you have about 4 hours to form it into the shape you want before it hardens. After the clay hardens, it can be sanded, painted, or you can sculpt more on top of it.
Four hours may sound like plenty of time, but that finite working time presented a challenge for me. Mostly, I just fudged around stressing about the “small” window of time I had to produce my masterpiece. I thought it might work nicely for sculpting onto 3D printed parts because it would bond to the print, then I could paint the completed maquette afterward. Unfortunately, I’ve never been a fast sculptor; add to that, I didn’t know how I would take the half-baked image of a hungry pot that I had in my head and form it with clay.
Hot Mess
Extremely Relevant Poison Dart Frog
I needed to slow down and take my sweet time reintroducing myself to sculpting. So I later spent an ENTIRE DAY sculpting this completely unrelated frog in a more familiar sculpting medium, Sculpey III, that allows unlimited time for dawdling. Sculpey brand Polymer clays become soft with a bubble-gum-like consistency after kneading and harden only after baking. It is the same type of clay I used to make the maquettes of Paul Winston pictured above. I chose not to use this when I was sculpting the carnivorous planter maquette because I was sculpting on 3D printed plastic, which would not hold its shape in the oven at the 275°F temperature required to set Sculpey III.
While creating this poison dart frog, it occurred to me that I forgot a critical aspect of sculpting; references. Better results come from looking up reference images of what you are trying to create, printing them out, and looking at them while bringing your masterpiece into existence. So, for instance, if you wanted to draw a character laughing, instead of trying to work solely from your memory of what laughing looks like, you’d find a variety of images (photos and illustrations) that show what it looks like when folks laugh. Body posture, eyes, nose, mouth, ears; notice the physical changes that signal someone is laughing. While working, keep looking at the images that show the type of laughter you want to depict in your drawing.
These are some of the reference images I've collected for the planter after some google image searching on phrases like “Hungry” and “Menacing.” Note; I did not create any pictures in the collage below, and I do not own any of them.
Collage of Reference Images Found in a Google Image Search
Next...
Eventually, I’ll take another stab at sculpting a plant home maquette, starting with clay that affords unlimited dawdle time, even if I can’t ever harden it. Then I may create another mini with Apoxie Sculpt if I want a painted maquette. Sculpting the same thing several times doesn’t sound very appealing, though, so we’ll see what I actually end up doing.
I may need to sculpt the teeth separately from the rest of the planter. I’m not sure what clay I’ll use for that. Hard, oil-based clays are not my favorite but, that may be the way to go. Eventually, when I sculpt the full-sized planter, I’ll need to choose a clay that doesn’t contain sulfur. Sulfur inhibits the cure of platinum-cure silicone, which I’ll use to make the mold for the planter.
Draft Written: December 26, 2021
Published: January 26, 2022
Last Updated: January 26, 2022
