I spent the last few weeks working on a super secret personal project, one of which I will share on my social media soon! Because of it, I wasn’t able to fully participate in the most recent round of Pure Art Collab, but I *did* manage to create something for the very last week.
This round, we asked you what your favorite Dreamworks movie was. Outside of perhaps How to Train Your Dragon, which we had just done, Shrek was the most popular answer, so that became our focus for the theme.
Theme 4: Choose your own
For the choose-your-own week, I decided to sculpt Dragon in my style. On top of that, I decided to try a new-to-me technique.
When I first started sculpting, I bought Emily Coleman‘s Creature Sculpt ebook. In it, there’s so much detail about setting up and creating a sculpture, and I was fascinated with the armature section, particularly because Emily creates such beautiful gravity-defying creations.
While I didn’t do anything too crazy for my first try, I decided to try a sort of leaping forward pose. Dragon moves around quite a bit on her back legs, so I was inspired to try and honor that with this sculpt. Instead of doing a standing up dragon, I thought I would try balancing it on one leg.
For this, I created a full wire armature and nailed it to a wooden base. I didn’t quite receive the optimal support with the wire I was using, and because it was a last-minute decision, I didn’t set up the weaker areas with apoxie sculpt, so I just did a bake after I had the base of the dragon sculpted out and continued to build on that.
The cobblestone floor was created using a fun texture sheet I had for a while but hadn’t ever used. I added this clay onto the wood and covered up the wire and nails holding the armature to the base. The main color was a dark purpley gray that I then textured with a toothbrush and painted other shades of gray on for some variance.
I ended up simplifying the amount of teeth in her mouth, and I also left off the eyelashes and makeup.
In the end, I think she turned out really cute, and even if you aren’t a Shrek fan, she’s still a fun piece.
