Genestealer Update 22: Sculpting the Knees and Elbows

 I know.  It's been way too long since I updated this project.

When I last posted, we had just finished printing, mounting, and epoxy coating the sculpting armatures for the knees, elbow, and hands.  They looked about like so:

The next step was to cover them completely with an 1/8" thick layer of oil-based clay.  Here you can see Jeff warming up a slice with a heat gun to make it more pliable:


In case you're wondering, the clay we're using here is Chavant Medium NSP which you can get here: LINK.  "NSP" stands for "Non Sulfur Plastilene."  Being sulfur-free is important because any residual sulfur that ends up in the molds will potentially inhibit the cure for the platinum silicone we'll be casting the parts in.  I use the medium hardness because it's a good trade-off between being hard enough to hold fine, sharp details and soft enough to work with my bare hands and just a little bit of heat.

By the end of the day, he had layered over the knees and elbow as well as all four hand armatures:


He got a start on sculpting the texture onto the elbow too:

Jeff usually only makes it up to the shop one day per week.  This time he left behind a little ziploc bag with all of his personal sculpting tools:

Odd:

Anyhow, the texture:


Between me and Andrew the Intern, we managed to get most of the texture sorted on the knees:


The look I've been going for on these sections is something akin to stacks of crab meat:

So now the elbow and tail sculpts are pretty much ready to mold:


The knees need a bit more work to brush off the little pills of clay in some of the creases, but they're almost there:


The push now is to hurry up and mold these pieces before something else in the shop bumps into them and I have to do more work fixing the sculpt:


So this week I'll finish the texture on the knees, mold these four pieces, and start messing around with castings.  

Then I can get back to work on the hands and feet:


The goal is to sculpt and mold increasingly complex shapes as I build up to the point where I'm doing the waist/hip/thigh section:

That piece is going to be a bit of a pain.  Still, as much of a challenge as that one will be, I'm still saving the head for last since it's the most important piece to get right.

Stay tuned as we make molds and the more plurple rubber.