Let Me Solo This Sculpture

hey guys my name is Art and in this video I sculpt the legend that is let me solo her and if that sentence sounded like a bunch of gibberish to you don't worry I haven't gone crazy I will explain if you do know what I'm talking about welcome please enjoy while I get started building the basic form and Anatomy which we will be building off of meanwhile let me catch everyone else up to speed on who this guy is that I am sculpting see there's this game called Elden ring it's an action RPG by a company called from software who's famous for their Dark Soul series and are known far and wide from making games that are quote unquote hard but fair their Boss Designs in particular are exceptional they usually require intense focus and observation to learn the enemy movements and patterns and what to do to counter them and Elden ring is no different one boss however stands Above All the Rest Melania blade of mikola goddess of rot who is without a doubt the hardest enemy or boss in the game she hits very hard heals herself when she does hit you and has a move that can kill you instantly if you don't don't know how to avoid it Melania is quite possibly the toughest enemy from software has ever made at least in the soul series and remember they are famous for making hard games however one of the things you can do in Elden ring when you run into a wall is summon other players into your world for help players can leave a little summon sign on the ground to let other players know that they're available to be called upon and people do all the time especially in hard areas and one of these players leaving their signs out is this guy that I'm sculpting he had learned how to beat Melania consistently and decided that he's going to help other players using his very well-honed skill so he hangs out near meladia's boss room waiting to be summoned wearing nothing but two katanas and a jar on his head and he calls himself let me solo her it's a crazy sounding name but if he shows up in your game you'd understand immediately that the name is a message that if you so choose you can step aside and allow let me solo her to fight Melania solo on your behalf so that's what he does over 2 000 times that we know of and he's gotten weirdly famous because of this videos have been made about him drinks and bars have been named after him and even Bandai Namco the game's publisher has sent him a commemorative sword as a gift in real life for his accomplishments and anyway I just think this is a really cool thing that in a game where you're constantly faced with insurmountable challenges some guy out there decided that he's gonna spend his days helping other players beat this seemingly impossible boss and that's the story behind this really kind of bizarre sculpture at least on its face but anyway here's what we have so far I'm working on the body first since he's mostly naked but there are lots and lots of things wrong with this such as the pecs the connection here is way too flat and it needs to round under the arm more the ABS the spacing on the ABS are just wrongly wrong wrong your belly button sits right in between your abs section three and four and should be way up here in the middle of the stomach and therefore section one needs to be much shorter and section four should be much longer the legs the angle of the thigh is too vertical and the musculature are just plain off the back the upper back around the shoulder blades are a mess this is just incorrect this is just it just doesn't look like this etc etc basically there's like a million things wrong with the anatomy right now and rather than me showing you exactly how I fixed all this I'm gonna Breeze through through all the refinement footage in the video because frankly I don't think it makes a good video to show you a step-by-step process of how I tried three times to fix the ABS before I got to the correct version and now I basically had to relearn how the shoulder blades work and I didn't even get that right until after I was done sculpting everything else on a sculpture so please just take my word for it it's wrong I fixed most of it some way somehow eventually you get the idea to be perfectly Frank I'm not super happy with how the anatomy of this piece turned out part of the challenge was me not being used to cosplay which I'm using for the first time and also I'm a little out of practice with Anatomy stuff in general which was another reason why I wanted to do this piece in the first place what better way to practice Anatomy than the sculpt basically a naked guy right that said here's the body basically done ish I'll continue to make small refinements that I won't show anymore but this is about 95 to what it'll end up being in the end take a look at this before and after there's lots and lots of small changes that accumulated over about a dozen sessions Can you spot all the differences and more importantly can you tell what is still wrong leave me some observations in the comments and I'll let you know if you're right okay so after I got the body to an okay shape I moved on to the underwear this part is super easy and as I said I'm using cosplay for this piece and because it's a polymer clay it can be baked in a home oven to cure into essentially a semi-flexible plastic in the case of Cosplay which means that at this point the body has been baked hard and I can very easily add the underwear without fear of damaging the body sculpt underneath plus it's just easier to have a solid platform to work off of this is by far are the easiest part of the whole piece and it's just one of those things that looks like it has a lot of detail but in reality is super easy to do if you generally understand the shapes you're making next I'm making the swords that let me solo her carries first we have a cold Enchanted ujikatana which for our purpose is just a normal looking Katana in retrospect this kind of hard surface accessory would probably have been better done with something really tough like epoxy clay but I was determined to use cosplay for as much of this piece as possible to learn how it behaves under different circumstances but really it's the wrong tool for the job anyway while the Uchi is pretty straightforward to make you do need a little bit of clay brand specific know-how to make something thin like this otherwise it can crack open mid big like so so I had to start over the second round I tried to keep the sword a touch thicker and to bake on a slightly lower temp and that turned out okay I think what happened with the first version was that the clay was just a bit too thin on the metal wire and it's just over baked the nice thing about Cosplay and really all polymer Clays is that you can sand and grind and carve and do all kinds of things to it after it's been baked so it's really helpful for hard surface stuff like this even if it would have been better with epoxy the handle is a not at all game accurate uh I didn't have enough control over the clay to make a super intricate grip so I just had to live with a simplified version I'm no stranger to trying hard but some things are just not worth spending that much time on now on to the other Katana which is a unique named weapon called rivers of blood it's got a really cool design with this wavy blade and these blood vein thingies running up the side and even though it looks more complicated rivers of blood was a lot easier to sculpt than the Uchi because there's a lot of room for error on the squiggly lines and I just didn't have to be nearly as precise as I did with the Uchi this is like a running theme for the whole piece simple things are harder than it looks and while I do think this is true for a lot of art forms I think it's especially true with sculpting things that look impressive aren't necessarily hard and things that are hard are some of the most ordinary looking things you can sculpt the difficulty often comes in Precision not complexity and again the handle is not really game accurate but it is a lot better on this one than on the Uchi for some reason I just found the pattern of the wraps easier to do in this case or maybe I just got better at working cosplay by this point whatever the reason I'm really really happy with how rivers of blood as a whole turned out after the swords are done I can glue them onto the mittens then sculpt the fingers around them it's really important to integrate the fingers directly onto the sword handles because your fingers squish a little bit when they're holding on to an object and if you don't account for that it won't look quite right this is one of those subtle details that helps sell the realism of a sculpture next the scabbards the process for these were done a lot like the swords except it was more forgiving since I didn't need to get the pieces as thin as the blades the kind of cool thing here is that I made a poor man's routing table using my Dremel to shape the scabbards with a bit more Precision followed by a bit of sanding then once the shape feels right then I can go in and add the details I didn't replicate the in-game models exactly of course especially the Scabbard Fork rivers of blood because it's just too high detail and a lot of it's going to be hidden anyway so I gave myself a bit of a pass on this one by the way you might have noticed the swords in a background in a less done State than last I showed you and that's because I'm actually working on all the parts simultaneously I'm just showing you the process in this order because it makes more sense this way rather than to jump back and forth between all the different components if I'd showed it to you chronologically I am keeping the Scabbard separate from the body and making a little alignment key for it so that it can be painted separately then reinstalled in the exact same position this will prove to be immensely helpful when it comes time to paint the model later on for the jar I'm starting with a lump of aluminum foil just to Pat it out then I'm going to just rough in the shape of the jar then bake right away once I have this hardened but misshapen jar I can refine it with a whole bunch of sanding just like the scabbards is an easy way to shape something like this I'm not sanding it super smooth in fact I'm leaving some pretty deep gouges that will be visible in the final piece which is something that I'd like to say that I meant to do but really I just got lazy and skipped sanding grades once a jar has been shaped in I can start putting in the details to be honest I wish I had done a better job here this sort of high detail stuff really requires that you know how to control the clay and I feel like I didn't have enough experience with cosplay to get it to be as good as I feel like it should be these waves around the jar in particular are not great they're a little too squishy and they don't have the elegant flowing lines of the original design I mean it still looks okay I don't mind it that much especially after it got painted but this is basically the sculptor's head and it's so iconic and such an important feature of the character I just wish it was a bit better you know if there's something that you should get right on a sculpture it's the head so of all the things that went wrong with this piece the jar is the one thing I wish I did better on I'm really simplifying this process for time by the way there was a lot of experimentation and reduce that I'm not showing here because it would just take too long otherwise and just like the Scabbard I'm leaving the jar detachable so that I can paint it separately from the body I'm doing this by making once again an alignment key on his neck so that the jar would install in the exact same position every time cause clay separator really helps out here it's a liquid that forms a barrier between cosplay pieces so that they won't stick together during baking so it's super useful for making close fitting Parts like this and that's the sculpting part done not my best work but as I said it's my first time using cosplay and Earnest and you can't work on one sculpture Forever at this point it's already been a few months since my last completed piece and I'm just better off learning what I can and moving on than to try and spend the next however long trying to perfect this one piece so on to the painting then I'm priming the model using a variation of a technique miniature painters call xenithal Prime basically I'm spraying the model from the top with a light gray and from the bottom with a dark gray this helps details naturally stand out and works kind of like built-in lighting it's my first time trying this technique and I liked it enough that I also decided to do the same thing with the flesh tones as well speaking of Flesh tones I wanted to replicate a certain golden hue that led me solo hers character model has but to be honest when I got it quote unquote right it looked kind of ridiculous he looked kind of like a muscly Simpsons character I think this is mostly because I didn't get the right undertones because people's skins aren't one color it's translucent than what we see a skin color is a combination of the skin itself the red blood underneath the various different veins not to mention the effects of lighting all that to say that because I went from Brown Shadows straight to a golden skin it looks very one-dimensional and cartoony despite the muscle lumps all over the sculpture eventually I decided to give up on the golden tone and decided to introduce a little green undertone and a tanned medium-ish skin instead even though this wasn't game accurate it was definitely the better choice compared to what I was doing before in either case I learned some lessons about painting skin from this experience which is kind of half the point of this project to learn and grow as an artist okay so next I'm painting the underwear and it looks terrible I started with a flat cream color followed by a brown wash and when that didn't work I tried dry brushing the underwear to bring out some highlights but it just looks like soiled underwear I'm gonna read you this later and the redo attempt is gonna cause me major problems but for now this is my first whack at it it's terrible we can just move along to the swords this is pretty straightforward metal paint on the metal Parts not metal paint on the not metal parts once again the simpler ujikatana is actually harder to do than the high detail rivers of blood because any mistakes you make like uneven coverage or paints going outside the line shows right up meanwhile the seemingly complicated rivers of blood looks fantastic and it's just a real joy to paint the veiny effects on the blade are kind of interesting in that the veins are darker than the areas in between which I thought was a really cool design Choice from the game I love little touches like this in from software's visual designs and it was a real pleasure to execute in real life to cap it off a layer of gloss varnish over the veins really sell the blood effects and we are ready to move on to the scabbards right about now I am very happy that I separated these scabbards out from the body it made the skin a lot easier to deal with and it definitely makes this part easier now the only unusual thing about the base layer is texturing it with a sponge to represent the worn out finish other than that it's pretty much paint by numbers following the in-game design as close as my sculpt allows one new technique that I tried with these scabbards is using oil washes you take some oil paint thin it down with mineral spirits and use that as a wash there are several benefits to this one the pigments are super dense the colors are so deep and saturated and the capillary actions of mineral spirits gets paint all up into the nooks and crannies and here's the best part you can scrub this right off because mineral spirits is completely non-reactive to acrylic paint I am free to shade as deeply as I want go way too far and scrub some most or all of it away without fear of damaging the paint underneath it's my favorite new painting technique and I cannot wait to try it again on another piece in the future for the jar I am doing something similar to the skin where I'm painting with a light color from the top and a darker color from the bottom for some built-in lighting effects this was I would say less effective on the jar I'm beginning to learn slowly that incorporating lighting effects into the model is more complicated than just spraying light colors from the top not only that the first color that I chose for the jar was too yellow so I kept trying various different shades to get it closer to the right one at some point I figured that the jar also needs an oil wash to really bring out the details on all those little nooks and crannies and damn it when it's all said and done it's just too dark and I didn't like it so I decided to rub the whole thing down with a mixture of mineral spirits and alcohol which won't just take off the oil wash but also affect the acrylic paint because alcohol takes off acrylics and as luck would have it somewhere underneath all those layers of paint was the correct color for the jar so there it is looks great I love it I wish I could say I did it on purpose but it was totally an accident oh and also can't forget that Wax Seal underneath as well all right remember how I said I was going to redo the underwear so here it is my plan is to repaint the underwear using the same top-down lighting technique that I used on the skin and to do that I'm painting on a liquid mask to mask off the flesh immediately around the undies and wrap everything else in cling wrap the masking process was easy enough the paint job itself went smoothly and I'm much happier with this result than the first attempt that looked like soiled underwear everything seemed like it was going exactly according to plan until I started peeling off the liquid mask and which I have to stress is the same Vallejo brand as the paint and the primer this happened the paint peeled off primer and all all the way down to the bare clay that gray you see that's bare clay I gotta be frank you guys this was crushing there had been so many problems and mistakes with this piece most of which I didn't even show you because it would turn this already excessively long video into a two hour documentary at this point I had two choices either strip off the entire model and restart the skin and at least parts of the swords from scratch or do a spot fix knowing that you'll be able to see signs of repair but live with it anyway and bottom line I just did not have the mental fortitude to start over as flawed as this piece is there's just not any real value in repainting the whole model from scratch so I re-primed and repainted all the damaged areas and tried my best to match the pre-existing skin tones the biggest challenge here is matching those tones because remember I went through many many layers of paint to arrive at the final tone that I ended up at and because these paints are all slightly translucent and the colors are custom mixed I can't just open up a let me solo her skin bottle and go to town anyway I did my best it didn't match exactly but it's close enough in retrospect I probably could have done this fix with an airbrush for a better texture but it's still a new tool to me and I'm not very confident with it especially not when it comes to high Precision spraying so I mostly suck with a brush and live with a mismatched texture and with that let me solo her is complete is what I would say if I didn't plan on doing the bass next so first I cut out a piece of foam that I took outside and lightly Brew laid while wearing a respirator don't burn foam indoors guys I attach it to the MDF base using hot glue and fixed up the sides using some spackling which is a bad idea that will come back to bite me shortly oh yes we have another one anyway after all that's done I mixed up some terrain paste which is just a mixture of plaster Sandy dirt mod podge and cheap acrylic paint if you live in an urban area like I do be careful where you get your dirt from you might get a few nasty surprises you weren't expecting so I mixed up way too much of this stuff and was an idiot and decided to use all of it it was way too much it took days to dry but eventually it did solidify enough for me to give it a nice deep Brown wash acrylic this time since I didn't care about wiping it off and I wanted a nice tint over everything hey remember that spackling well paint wouldn't stick to this either I don't know what's wrong with it but I replaced it with wood filler instead and that seems to work okay if anything this video is an example of how you can mess up a lot and still end up with something decent at the end I can laugh about it now but it was not fun at the time let me tell you all right we're in the home stretch I'm gonna add some water effects to represent the shallow pool in the middle of melania's Arena that's what this slope and a dirt is for the problem is I used UV resin this size pore really should have been a two-part resin but I was doing some wishful thinking and was just hoping that this would be okay but it wasn't UV resin heats up a lot and shrinks during curing to the point where it deformed the foam and separated from the base you can see where this icy looking effect is where it's separated and you can really see it on the sides here so just like the paint peel on the skin I can either start over or live with it and again I chose live with it because the sculpture is already very flawed making a crystal clear bubble free water isn't gonna make the piece any better so I filled in the cracks as much as I can from the sides and moved on to the flowers the Melanie arena is filled with these beautiful white flowers from software sure love their flowerfield Arenas and I do too which is why I'm going to make a bunch of flowers for my little terrain here I'm using translucent cosplay and mixing color right into the clay which will save me from having to paint these later on this is one of those things that probably looks just as tedious as it was to actually do but to be frank I wish I had done more in the end I got nine flowers and really it could do with like 20. I did try to look for like pre-made dollhouse flowers or something to avoid doing this by hand but I couldn't find a good match so I had to make every petal and every leaf individually by hand instead after all the flowers have been glued in I added a touch more terrain paste to hide the seams for the sculpture and the base meet then it's time for the final bit of water effect using gloss Mod Podge I'm also sprinkling in some Fallen flower petals because of course those are also in a game and I couldn't live without them either but with that the base is done which means the sculpture is finally complete totally for realsies this time and when you put it all back together it looks something like this thank you what a journey I had no idea how hard this project was going to be when I first started out on it especially for something that seemed so simple I learned so much doing this so many firsts so many problems so many fails but you know what it's strangely appropriate because doing this project in a weird way it's a little bit like playing Elden ring yeah it's hard yeah you spend a lot of time failing you run into walls and you try and try again until you manage to get over that wall some way somehow only to run into another one and another one and another one but the joy of a project like this is not the result it's what you had to go through to get it it really is about the journey it really is about the dedication and determination and not giving up when things are hard so if you made it all the way to the end of the video I want to thank you for watching I hope you found this interesting or at least diverting and I wish you great success on your seemingly simple but actually difficult Endeavor whatever it might be and that's it for this one guys I will see you next time bye bye

Channel: Art Chong Art

Views: 1,385,995

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Id: MMoDffZVxYM

Length: 25min 25sec (1525 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 01 2023