He's Got a Knife: Core Construction

Thus far, I've reviewed the design process for He's Got a Knife. Now it's time to get our hands dirty with the core construction.

1. The Skeleton. I used aluminum foil to build the inner core of both the monster and the man. There are several reasons to build the core:

• It provides an solid internal structure to which the clay can adhere.
• It's useful to rough out the main shape and get the scale right.
• It cuts costs. Foil is significantly cheaper than clay.
• It allows for thinner, more easily baked sections of clay (i.e. you're not baking a tennis ball-sized chunk of clay...you're only baking/curing the .5 inch outer layer).

I used foil because it's cheap, light, bake-able, and we already had it on hand. I created a very rough estimate of the monster's outline with some tightly wrapped and heavily crunched foil. It was close enough that the foil monster would actually stand on it's own but that's the extent of my exactness here. I made a similar structure for the guy but it ended up being little more than a skinny stick figure.

I have heard of people using wire armatures or materials like chicken wire to build the core. I haven't tried this but I think if I were making something where I might want to reposition something mid-sculpt, the wire would hold up better than foil.

2. The Bulk. Using the foil as the base, I began bulking up the creature using Original Sculpey. There are other similar products like Fimo but I have yet to try them. I've been pleased with my previous work with Original Sculpey and, well, I don't don't like change. If you're not familiar with Sculpey, it's a polymer clay that remains soft until you bake it for 15 minutes at 275 degrees for each .25 inch of thickness. It's also easy to work with and relatively inexpensive. It does tend to be a bit brittle after baking so I'm hesitant to use it for small or thin pieces. It was perfect, though for building up the monster's beefiness.

At this point, I had already decided to make the monster a swamp beast but the figure was still pretty rough. No fingers. No toes. Just a stump for a head. The details come later.