Recently I stumbled across an excellent, step by step photo tutorial of a 28mm pirate sculpt by the gentleman behind Musketeer Miniatures.

In nine parts he takes us from creation of the wire armature to a finished sculpt using ProCreate epoxy putty which has recently appeared on the market. Frankly this has to be one of the best sculpting tutorials I’ve found on the web to date which is why I’m reposting it here. It’s so good I’m considering using it as a copying exercise and attempting to create my own version of this pirate from green stuff just for practice (of course).

ProCreate putty sounds like an improvement over green stuff as well, which I find a little annoying to use simply because it’s so tacky. Musketeer Miniatures sell ProCreate too, and I’m tempted to pick some up, although I should use up the foot or so of green stuff tape I have left first.

I’ve bought several very useful sculpting tools from Phil of PitYak Studios in the past. Unfortunately one tool he didn’t have was a small ball burnisher which I was after for smoothing sculpted green stuff.

Recently he told me about a craft store he’d found locally in Wellington that sold some cheap and useful tools. In particular they had a 0.5/1mm ball burnisher tool that he picked up and was good enough to send me gratis. Thanks Phil, I definitely owe you one!

By the way PitYak Studios sell a fine range of detailed resin 28mm figure bases as well as a wide range of modeling tools and basing materials.

Prophet Minis recently announced their new ‘Sculptors Do It With Small Tools’ product which is a kit that contains enough materials to sculpt up to half a dozen 28mm figures. For the tools and materials supplied it looks to be pretty good value at $34.99us. Unfortunately I already have plenty of sculpting tools, dollies and green stuff littering my paint station.

However I noticed they also sell the sculpting tutorial included in the kit as a separate, downloadable PDF for a mere $7us. For that price I figure it’d be hard to lose so I grabbed a copy.

It’s not a bad tutorial at all. Most of the basics are covered included the working properties of green stuff, how to use and create your own armature dollies, various figure proportions and ratios (for men and women), dynamic poses and visual balance for figures.

The tutorial also contains some specific methods for creating hair, fur and thin sheets of green stuff for clothing and cloaks as well as a two page step-by-step on sculpting faces. Finally it includes a couple of handy reference pages giving figure ratios in various scales (54mm to 10mm) and front/back pictures of showing stylised male musculature.

There are a couple of gaps in the tutorial. For example I would like to see a step-by-step of an entire figure being sculpted and while creating faces is covered there’s no tips for sculpting hands which can be another problematic area in my experience.

Even so $7us well spent I feel and the PDF has been carefully filed into my ’sculpting’ folder.

Update: According the to the Prophet Minis forums a tutorial for sculpting hands should be appearing on their web site in the future.

Via Tabletop Gaming News.

Ok a little off topic, but here’s some lovely (relatively speaking) Halloween Pumpkin Sculpture from Villafane Studios (warning annoying Flash front page), with a how-to photo tutorial even!

We’re not quite as Halloween crazy here in New Zealand as people are in the States. We’ll do a bit of trick and treatin’ in the street with the kids but nobody wears costumes to work or anything. I tell you it was a bit of an eye opener catching the Silicon Valley Light Rail during Halloween while I was working over there several years ago!

Via Boing Boing.

Mr Willard Wigan sculpts stuff IN the eye of a needle. Check out the photos on the official site.

Man and I thought the jump from 28mm to 15mm scale figures was tough!

Via Boing Boing.

Here’s an interesting trade article about the systems Games Workhop are now using for rapidly creating their new plastic figure lines. Gone are the day of ‘3 ups’ and pantograph machines.

I assume they’re still using the old fashioned sculpt and vulcanized mold system for metals but who knows?

There’s some interesting tidbits in there too, like the fact that GW used to produce 60 ‘tools’ (ie. new molds) a year but now they’re looking at 100 ‘tools’ a year with the new system. I assume this means we’ll see a lot more plastic regiment boxes in the future. Apparently they also run the plastic molding process ‘almost 24 hours, 365 days a year’.

As a gamer it’ll be very interesting to see what their sprues look like in several years once GW are old hands at this method. I haven’t been that impressed with the newer sprues (eg. Dwarf Warriors) because of their limited poses and loss of some detail on some surfaces which is presumably a side effect of this newer method.

Article spotted on The Darkwing.

There’s an interesting technique described in the www.creafigs.com forums here. How to create detailed, custom press molds by scribing with a sharp tool and then using them to create fantastic looking armor details.

This is a French site, so the instructions are in French, but the pictures pretty much tell the story…plus you can always try translating the page.

There’s a fine example of this technique on www.coolminiornot.com.