Making Small Armatures for Figurative Sculpture

[Music] [Music] hi this is micro peon there's been some questions about building armatures a lot of people kind of don't use them they're afraid to use them or they just never learned how to make one and there are many cases where you're going to want to use an armature of depending on what kind of sculpture you're doing most of the time you know many of my students will use water-based clay and then fire it and they don't need to armature in it they just hollow it out when the bakes you can't you can't bake something with aluminum armature and it just would tend to crack this is this sculptures in this case so there are times where you need an armature and when I was at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts many years ago we built the basic garbage it was to hold water clay or plastiline whatever you wanted there was very simple armature kind of a skeleton of the of the figure and it's really simple to make and you might find you can make it four figures or animals and in this case I have a project that I'm working on commissioned from my hometown in Manchester Connecticut and they needed to see we need to figure out what pose that we want this runner to be in his name was Joe McCluskey and so we're using archival footage and photographs to determine you know what pose would be best and eventually this will be over life-size figure running along the Greenway so in this case I decided since I'm I need to we need to come up with some kind of pose I want to give them a couple ideas and in most cases if I had an armature we would have a pipe that would come out 90 degrees and be bolted down onto this wood base here in this case I found that if I used it small threaded rod and want to tight the armature to that that it would work really well it's bolted on the top with a washer and it is also bolted on the bottom with a washer and you just cinch those up and you have a pretty sturdy armature and then I just tie the armature on with some water but in order to make the armature a lot of times I'll use aluminum gauge wire depending on the size of the figure if you want to do a 12 inch figure like this I've used eighth inch water this is you can buy this aluminum wire most most stores art stores supplies if not you can you find a wholesaler that will sell you a whole spool of it but again if I'm doing maybe an 18-inch figure I would use a quarter inch or anything a larger two quarter inch to 3/8 after that you almost get in a situation where you want to do some welding to create the armature so it's strong depending on how much mass and clay are using again some of these areas of using metal but I don't have a lot of clay that's going on there if I'm using a lot more clay I can fill it with foam or some other things so the first thing I do is determine the size of the figure I want to make and so in this case there was 12 inches this one's approximately the same size and the first piece I want there's two pieces of wire you need you need to cut one that is the length of one leg up the head down the hips and then down the leg so that's that right and then you need a second wire that's about the same little shorter but it's what this does is it works to the the midsection up to the shoulders and then down to the arms and then I tie these with some tie wire likely sixteenth of an inch or something I could tie that on really tight it's important to adjust it so that once you have this section you know these are this long water that's just basically bent like this you want to determine where the halfway point in this point it's and usually the great trochanter and the pubic bone is approximately on most models about halfway you can adjust your armature to your model if you have a specific model that has very long legs in the shorter torso you just adjust it before you go into time the tie wire on so in this case we're just if this is a twelve inch figure this measurement here with a little extra on top of the head about a quarter of an inch because I'm gonna have clay there again I don't want I don't want the armature to show through this in this case you don't see the armature I it's kind of a rule of sculptors that built are features that you don't show the armature out that's the key so we try to do that and it's not really a skeleton what it is is just a support for the clay so we want that wider along the whole thing to run in the center of the body Center the arm center of the head center of the midsection and this is this is just one section of that okay so here I've added the hips okay and now the other part this is the arms and what I did was I found my midsection here I brought it up to here and I figured a little bit core Ridge for the head and I've got my shoulders and these can be adjusted and I take my tie wire and tie your knot so this is pretty much it the only difference I did with these armatures was I went over to the vice and two pieces of wire two pieces of wire and you put one end in the vise you put the other end in the drill and you slowly drill and these will twist and you get this nice twisty sort of effect it's kind of a cool trick it's fun to do even if you're not going armatures that's about it as far as putting the clay on like I said I start I try to cover the whole armature in clay once I had the pose I took the armature I wired it as I said wired it onto a threaded rod with nuts - nuts and washers which cinched it to the board and it doesn't move you know it's pretty good it shakes a little bit but it's good and there's this if you want to move it you know you have to move the arm you have to adjust things you can do it pretty well and it's fun you know and it also gives the committee or some group that you're working with a chance to see oh okay well you know if you'll understand a little bit further how do we do how's that look and you can adjust these things to some degree and then it's a lot of fun you could use animals too and what you do is you just add an extra section per tail it's really easy and make sure the wire is tight when you're you wrap the tie wire on that's about it it really on armatures is there's probably there's a lot of sculptors i've come across through the years that are don't believe in armatures it's like well how can you not believe in armatures you know it's just part of it it's a tool and you know wow you know a chain I can't well you have to learn to use them and at first you're gonna find you want to make sure you know where all it gives you a good balance of proportions you can adjust the proportions depending on what model you're going from by just bending the knee in its certain place adjusting this the shoulders you can make a the same our maturity can man but if you have something to go on ahead of time and you know who you're the pose is or is a woman a man or an animal you know you can adjust the armature to that you could even use a photograph and just place this onto the photograph of the same size and cut it out it's a pretty simple stuff so I hope that that's somewhat clear and if you have questions feel free to contact me at my website again it's quite easy to do and you'll be happy because you'll your clay won't be falling down and I had one student didn't use an armature for about 200 pounds of clay and she came in the final week suggest what happened I said what she said it fell down I said they'll kill anybody because 200 pounds of clay on a modeling stand this like this rinky-dink thing anyway we don't want to go there we want to be safe sculpt and have fun talk to you soon [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: Michael Keropian

Views: 84,283

Keywords: iMovie

Id: Iekv_Q1PVG8

Length: 9min 31sec (571 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 04 2017