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.