Stopping the Time

Hello again,

after my little preview session I´ve sent the showcased masters (see below in the next blogpost) to casting. Now it´s taking a while for them to be produced and I am taking a small break from Israelis and Insurgents and moving on to the next batch of figures.

And, for the first time I am properly recording how long it takes for the figures to be sculpted. So far I have not forgotten to take my notes on start- & end time, and I hope I can keep it up until they´re finished.

Four figures are getting produced with this batch and I´m recording total time for all four. Right now, they look rather unimpressive, but there´s already quite some time invested into them:

Hmm, what might it be?!

Starting with the armatures and wireframes, I´m building up the first layer, the head+face and the trousers.  So far, this has take me 3 hours in total for all 4 figures. The faces have taken me slightly more time for these than usual, as I tried to get the result right and there are slight variations from my standard faces that made the job harder for me.  All in all, the time is distributed on the four steps in the following way:

• Wire Armatures & Posing: 30 min
• Layer 1: 45 min
• Heads & Faces: 60 min
• Legs / Trousers: 45 min

Or caculated on a per-figure average divided by four:

• Wire Armatures & Posing: 7,5 min
• Layer 1: ~11 min
• Heads & Faces: 15 min
• Legs / Trousers: ~11 min

For a total of about 45 minutes per figure so far.  I might be able to cut some more corners for the first layer, but remember the recorded time includes all mixing of putty, handling tools and other stuff. Its the time from sitting down at the desk to getting up from the desk.

With a few more steps to go, I´d estimate that 2-3 hours per figure is a realistic figure, but we´ll see what the record says at the end. Following steps are still ahead:

• Upper Body Work: Adding Vests or clothes & gear to the torso
• Add weapon & arm framework: Glue the weapon on and add tentacles as arm-proxies
• Build up the arms based on the tentacle
• Add helmet 
• Finetuning & reworking mistakes