You know how I’ve sculpted a dodo digitally? Well, because I’m a physical sculptor at heart, I wanted to work on making at least one physical dodo out of greenstuff so that I can have a better idea of what I’m trying to make in the digital realm. Also, I like sculpting weird lil’ dudes, and nothing beats a dodo for being a weird lil’ dude.

Additionally, I think sculpting information should be hosted in places like this, because I am the sort of person who learns through reading and images that lead into practice. Video content is all well and good – especially once you know how you’re doing stuff – but this sort of step-by-step is important to keep alive in the spirit of Old Internet, a topic on which my attitude is clear.

Sculpting Supplies

As this information always comes up when I talk about sculpting and teach classes, I’m just going to cover the basics here. What you’ll need for sculpting are five things:

• Armature material: In this case, 24 gauge brass wire.
• Armature holder: I’m using a cork with greenstuff coating it to create a flat surface to sculpt on.
• Sculpting material: I’m using greenstuff. It’s stored with the parts separated, in my freezer, and taken out only when I need more.
• Sculpting tools: My primary tool is a Tiranti SG, which is relatively close to the classic Wax #5 used by the old guard of GW sculptors. I also use some silicone clay shapers in size 0 (flat chisel, cup chisel, and taper) and a blunted sewing needle held in an old hobby knife handle.
• Tool lubricant: I use vaseline, cleaned off with isopropyl once the putty has set up.

These are absolutely the basics, and you can sub a lot of these for whatever you’re comfortable with.

In terms of greenstuff: unfortunately, there’s no current manufacturer and old stock is very hit-or-miss in terms of quality. If you have any, store the parts separately in a freezer and try to trim off any skin that’s formed. I like to keep it in wax paper rather than the plastic that it comes in, as well. Sylmasta is currently working on their own version. I cannot recommend getting anything from Green Stuff World – they’re a business I refuse to support due to exploitation of artists, patent trolling, and other moral/ethical reasons, plus their in-house GS is not good and doesn’t behave like the real stuff.

If you’d like to extend the life of greenstuff, there’s a few options you can go to: mixing in about 10-15% FIMO professional gives you a much more well-behaved putty that is less sticky, feathers nicely, and sets up well under a heat lamp or putty oven once you’re done sculpting. You can also mix it up to 50/50 with plasticine (the sort of non-curing vegetable oil based clay) and it will still cure firmly enough to be usable and paintable. That mixture, which I learned from Scibor thanks to some of his posts, also has the advantage of removing the need for tool lubrication, but it’s a little more fragile than using straight GS. Yes, it does cure just fine, and you can cast models and paint them – I’ve got sculpts that are 4+ years old and painted that are totally fine.

If you want to post-process your sculpting material, then mix in Aves Apoxie Sculpt – it machines beautifully and takes on the best properties of both GS and Apoxie Sculpt. I tend towards a 60/40 GS/AS mixture for most of my work. Once it cures, you can file it, scrape it, and do all kinds of cool stuff to it!

Otherwise, when mixing greenstuff, you’ll want more yellow than blue. I tend to aim for about a 3:2 ratio of yellow to blue, and then mix in whatever additional additives I’d like to use. Aves’ is my primary mixer when just doing general sculpting, but this was all done in pure GS for reference.

Armature, Masses, and Shapes

Now that I’ve covered materials and all the boring stuff, let’s talk sculpting a dodo! What you’ll want to start off with is a wire armature: I take about a 5″ length of 22 gauge brass wire, bend it in half, and then twist it until I’ve got a decent size for the neck and body. Once that’s done, I bend out the hips, then form the legs. Once that’s done and posed a bit, I trim off the excess brass wire (I only want a bit of wire to go into the cork) and attach it to my armature holder.

Yes, it looks like a walking penis at the moment. We’ll eventually fix that.

Looking at the armature, you can see I’ve added some movement to the skeleton – it’s leaning slightly to one side, the legs are offset from one another, and the posture is set like it’s charging. This is intentional – adding a little bit of motion to your sculpts can make them look a lot better, as well as help when you’re doing a bunch of them.

After checking my poses, I start with the feet and initial leg putty. For the feet, I looked up what a dodo foot looks like, and exaggerated the size a bit so that it was actually readable at the scale. For this particular dodo, it’s got some awfully big stompers because it’s a Leonoran Giant Dodo, one of nature’s most ridiculous creations. In all cases, I start working general to specific – first adding the full mass of putty and getting the rough mass, then trimming and shaping to find the general shapes, and finally working to refine the details so that they’re readable. As the feet are going to be visible on the final model, I add some details that aren’t seen elsewhere on the initial sculpt – in this case, the little ridges on the skin and the slightly-pointy talons/bird nails (unclear on the exact term when it comes to these particular birds) at the ends of the toes. You can see that one foot is lifted off the ground and curling into itself – this helps with the sense of motion and action that I’m aiming for.

A quick note – because this isn’t intended to be cast, I’m not paying too much attention to undercuts or other elements, but if you end up wanting physical casts, keep mold geometry in mind! These wouldn’t cast cleanly without some parting, at least in my estimation as a terrible mold-maker who leaves that to actual professionals who know what they’re doing. It’s also here where I give my advice to new sculptors that is simultaneously incredible helpful to keep in mind while sculpting and which sounds like I was really stoned when saying it: “Everything is just made up of shapes.”

Insightful, ain’t I? Look at the legs and count the cylinders Where the joints are, you can mentally insert little spheres. At the hips, imagine a little rectangular box that the hip joints connect to. If you follow the shapes, they’ll never lead you astray.

Okay, now that I’ve gotten that little bit of advice out of the way, it’s time to start bulking out our dodo.

As you might be able to tell, I’ve started by making rough shapes on top of my armature. All I’m doing at this stage is making an understructure that I can sculpt details on top of – because feathers require a lot of detail and thoughtful placement, it’s best to sculpt them over a supported surface, rather than over sliding, uncured putty. The feet, as mentioned, will be visible on the final sculpt, so those got the most detail, and will likely get a bit more trimming as I work on cleaning up the sculpt further. Right now, I’m just trying to get the dodo silhouette to look correct – detail is added after your shapes and posing are correct, and if they aren’t, the sculpt itself will look wrong.

Remember, it’s a process! I sculpt daily (along with painting every day) because I’m kind of a crazy lady who likes doing that, but if you’re worried about anything, always remember you can easily trim back putty. Heck, if you’re working in layers like I recommend, you can just pop a cured layer off and start over. Nothing is permanent unless you’re carving a stone, in which case I’d wonder why you’re doing things that way.

Now sculpt the rest of the fucking dodo

I will admit that I have deceived you all in this post, for I haven’t actually finished the above dodo. Additionally, it’s not the first one I’ve sculpted, as I only thought to take WIP shots once I was finished with the first one!

See how this one has slightly smaller feet, feathers, and actually readable details on it, rather than general shapes? This was Dodo 1, my first attempt at a quick dodo sculpt. Quite the polite little fellow, and the very font of bamboozlement that brought this post to you.

In all seriousness, this just shows how adding some basic details on top of your understructure can drastically transform a simple set of shapes into something much more recognizable. This lil’ guy was mostly to keep my hands busy while listening to some stuff, so he’s got a lot of rustic charm, but I’m a big fan. So, be like me and sculpt the rest of the dodo.

Hobby Progress

Got some painting done today, which is great because I didn’t think I’d really have time to get any done. Today’s painting was a little more detail oriented than usual, and involved a lot more highlighting than I would do typically for a model, so hopefully it ends up looking good.