Miniiature Mangalore bust (2 hour sculpt)

This was just a quickie. Trying to get my hand in on miniature sculpting so I went for something with nice big detail for my first attempt. The sculpt is about 3 inches high, so still a little bit big.


Sorry for the quality of the photos my phone doesn't focus well at this distance.

One thing I'm struggling with is that with monster clay it's quite hard to handle small amounts without it distorting due to the heat of your hands. Anyone have any tips for that? Also I'm not sure how to texture smaller pieces very well so any tips there would be awesome too.

Cheers

compressed air can upside down to freeze one section of the sculpt while you continue on another maybe? Hopefully that is helpful. It's something I've done in the past for working with Monster Clay or Chavant.

What CellisVallen said. I did a full-mask sculpt and probably went through a big can of the compressed air on it. I recommend blasting small sections at a time.

As far as texturing small pieces, one thing I've had luck with is making "stamps" out of oven-hardening clay (Super Sculpey II for example). Sculpt the pattern you want into the super sculpy, make a little 'handle' for the stamp, bake and then go to town on your sculpt. I've found it really useful for skin texturing

Yes, thank you both. The compressed air method works. It's still kind of hard handling smaller pieces but at least the compressed air means I don't have to stop working.

I'm experimenting with different ways of texturing really small pieces at the moment but it's kind of tricky.

Ok, I wasn't planning on doing much more with this but a friend saw this and asked if I was planning on making a full sculpt. I said no and he asked if I would think about it because he'd really like one. I said I'd look into to but I don't have a clue about how much molding and casting is. It looks like the figure would need to be about 15 inches high so it's roughly a 1:6 scale. What materials would be best for the final cast? How difficult is it to mold something with this much detail? How much of each material will I need to order? Any help there would be great.

Anyway here's where it's at right now, I pretty much restarted. Still a rough sculpt, I need to add wrinkles and texture once I'm set on the features.

Oh wow! The prop store are auctioning a full Mangalore suit!

http://www.propstore.com/product/fi...on-complete-mangalore-creature-costume-rifle/

It does mean I'll have to re-do my sculpt (again!) if I go forward with it but there are some awesome reference photos on the website.