Big Pony Designs

MY HEART! *dies*

(Source: woonastuck)

I uploaded this to DA but forgot to do it here. >.<

This is just a picture showing how big my sculpture is compared to me. Had some people that wanted to know so I decided to do it. 

Happy accidents are the best.

I was smoothing out the lines in the secondaries/primaries so I could redraw and sculpt fewer of them. As I was doing this I noticed that I was giving them the soft, feathery look they needed. My teacher was in the room at the time and he said that it looked good. The edges are very, very subtle. You may not even see some of them in these pictures, but they are there. They stand out a lot more when you look at it in person. 

I did redo the coverts. All it took was adding one more “feather” to get the right look. That’s it. I’m getting to the point now where the smallest changes have a huge impact on how the sculpture looks. I also like the look of the 4:7 covert to secondary/primary feather ratio. I think it might have to do with that ratio being really close to the golden ratio, but that’s a completely different discussion for another day. 

Anyway, the wings aren’t completely perfect. I’ll go in tomorrow and see something wrong with them. I’ll be messing with them until the day I have to let it dry out. 

I’m thinking about softening up the eyes a little and possibly try to define more definite bone structure, because right now it seems like the eyes are cut straight out of the head. Like there’s no underlying structure. While this looks fine in this case, I still want to play around with the idea. It might seem like I’m being too picky, but I need to be. This might be my last sculpture for a very long time and I want to make it the best I can.

Just one picture today. 

Made an attempt at sculpting the wings. I only did this one for now. At first I thought I was doing fine until I got my teacher to come in and take a look. The biggest issue was the contrast between the two parts of the wing. The front part (the coverts) are simple and have a soft appearance while the back part (the secondaries and primaries) are defined and have hard edges. 

There are two big ways to fix this. One way is to make the coverts more detailed by adding a few more feathers and sharpening the edges. Another is to tone down the secondaries and primaries by decreasing the number of them and by softening the edges. This will make them look fluffier to match the coverts. 

Then my teacher and I got to talking about other ways that might fix it without even touching the wings again. It was a pretty in-depth discussion about the different elements of the sculpture and how I defined them with either a sharp or soft edge. What it basically boiled down to was if I make some of my edges sharper, like on the chest piece and shoes for instance, then that will soften up the edges on the wings because they will have sharper edges than the wings. If that makes any sense. 

It made sense when we talked about it. I just suck at explaining things. lol

Anyway, I’m going to make changes to it tomorrow. I’m going to do some wings studies to find out exactly how I want to sculpt them. 

I ALMOST carved too deep. 

After I carved out both pupils, I went back and poked at them with my finger to test how thick the clay was. The right eye was fine (her right, your left) but the left one caved in a little, so I had to do the one thing I didn’t want to do. I had to cut a hole in her head so I could add clay to the inside at the weak spot. 

The last three pictures were taken after I fixed the eye and repaired the access hole. You can hardly even tell I cut a hole in her noggin. I also did some more work on the nose. I added a little bit of clay to the front to round it out some. It was still too geometric for my tastes. I even started to define the mouth some.

Now that I’ve got the pupils about where I want them, I can start worrying about the horn. From the looks of these photos, it seems I need to reshape the eyes a little. One looks different from the other. Everything will come together eventually.

Went in thinking that I needed to make some drastic changes to the ears after looking at the pictures I took. Turns out that I didn’t need to do much to them. I just did a tiny bit of cosmetic work. 

I did, however, work on her face. You probably can’t tell a big difference from Day 24, but I did make some changes. I softened the angle of the bridge of her snout and I redefined her jaws. I sculpted them back to where they would end where the bottoms ears start. I also added a little clay to the underside of them to try to recreate Luna’s (well, alicorns in gerenal) unique jawline. They are more curvy than normal ponies’ jaw lines. I also did some small cosmetic work around the eyes. 

I got to talking to my teacher about how I was going to do the eyes (paint them or carve them). My original plan was to paint them on after it was fired and finish them with a glossy clear coat, but I’m starting to think differently. The main reason I was going to paint them on is because I built the head hollow. I was thinking that it would be a huge headache to carve out the eyes like I usually do because I’d end up carving all the way through and would have to somehow add more clay to the inside of the head. After talking to my teacher about it, it won’t be as bad as I had originally thought. He even told me that I didn’t have to carve the pupils that deep for them to make an impact. Just the slightest indention will trick the eyes into seeing a pupil that’s darker than everything else. So I’m going to give that a shot. 

Haven’t been able to work on her for a couple of weeks due to spring break and the thing with the portfolio display, but now I can get started again.

Started working on her ears. They’re not perfect. Right now from looking at these I see where I need to tweak the position and angle of them. I also feel like I need to give them a little more volume, but I’ll have to wait until they dry out some before I can do that. 

Next I’ll tweak the ears like I said, shape the face some more, and possibly start on her horn.