Never paint one of my sculpts

In the many weeks since my last post, I completed the tomb king bust, which I have just remembered to upload to Putty & Paint here. I’m generally pretty happy with how he came out – the lighting is a bit all over the place, but I rationalise that with the rule of cool – I needed the light to hit places it probably shouldn’t have to make sure the gold was suitably shiny.

In case you don’t want to head over to Putty & Paint, here’s how he ended up:

Since then, I started Kate Bush. I then restarted Kate Bush. I then stripped Kate Bush and restarted again with oils. I then stripped Kate Bush, discovered that one of her heels had broken off and pretty much discarded her. She’s essentially unpaintable.

The main reason for this is that I’m not a very good sculptor. A secondary reason is that I was too fixated on trying to replicate a specific pose from the Wuthering Heights music video. This isn’t, in itself, a terrible idea. The problem is that for a model to work as a paintable object, the forms need to work to help the painter establish contrast and composition. This wasn’t something I really managed terribly well with Kate. So she’s being removed from the set of pop stars.

The lesson is to never paint anything I have sculpted. I think that next time I have a great idea that requires models that don’t exist, I’ll need to bite the bullet and get someone else to sculpt them for me. If you’re a sculptor who wants to be paid to be involved in weird projects that may or may not get noticed at shows, do get in touch.

To get over this, I started on Freddie, and he’s been much more accommodating. There are still issues that come down to my terrible sculpting, but the overall figure is much more amenable to being painted. (One of his feet did break off, but I can fix that pretty easily once I get onto the legs.)

He will get a generous dose of AK Ultra Matte before he’s finished, so hopefully the errant, less controllable shine on his hair and vinyl miniskirt will be a little less distracting. But now I’m quite looking forward to painting his vintage Hoover.