Welcome to my new Blog

Welcome to my new Blog.

In this Blog I will present some ideas and tutorials about sculpting tools and how to build them on your own.

When I say "sculpting tools", I mean those special tools for sculpting Miniatures in very small scales like 30mm or 54mm. So for the "more typical" sculptor, who do stuff in a larger scale, it might be not the most usefull Blog, but maybe there will be also things, that might be interesting for him (or her).

So before I start, some words about my personal view on sculpting miniatures:
When I was young (it was in the early 80´s) I discovered the game Dungeons and Dragons (maybe there are some people around, that still know it). So short after that I get in contact with those fantasy miniatures, that we used in combination with D&D (made by companies Citadel/Games Workshop and Ral Partha for example). I was very fascinated by these miniatures for all their details and so I tried to make my own miniatures. In that time, sculpting miniatures was a very exotic hobby in fact, it still is). I didn´t knew anyone else personally who did the same thing at this time and there was no internet to search for sculpting fellows.

I made my first miniatures with FIMO, that´s a polymer putty, that has to be heated to harden. Then I discovered the two part epoxy-putty Milliput in a shop and did a lot of miniatures with it until someone gave me my first pack of a now famous putty called greenstuff, which was a real break-through in sculpting for me.

In the beginning, I made casting moulds with rtv-silicone from my sculptings and cast them in white metal for me and my friends. Later I sold a lot of my sculpted miniatures to a german company called EXCALIBUR, who spinn-cast them in white metal and sold them. The company still exists and the funny thing is, that some of my old (and quite crappy, to be honest) miniatures are still in their range.

It was somewhere in the 90´s, when I loose interest in sculpting miniatures for a couple of reasons and I completely forgot about it for more than ten years. Then in 2006 I rediscovered my old hobby and I was fascinated, how much miniature sculpting has evolved since then. Thanks to the internet, there are large communities of sculptors, who share there work and ideas.

So I started again a little bit of sculpting and it was a real nostalgic thing for me, not only because my first new sculptings resemble the characters, that I and my old friends play in our D&D-sessions when we where kids.

When I have a look at miniature sculpting now I sometimes wonder where it might go. Since my early sculpting days, the technology especially regarding to computers, 3d software and rapid prototyping evolved so much, that I ask myself, if in ten years there might be still sculptors, who do there sculptings by hand.

But now there are still a lot of sculpting people around. When I came back to sculpting, I discovered, that despite all those years, that have passed since my first sculpt, it is still not easy to get the right tools to work with. In fact, the only innovation regarding miniature-sculpting-tools I discovered where the so called clayshapers.

An interesting thing is, that a lot of tools, that claim to be especially dedicated for sculpting miniatures, are -regarding to size and quality- not ideal to tell it in a more friendly way.
There are very few high-quality-tools you can buy, that are especially made for sculpting in small scales. Most of the time sculptors use some kind of dental tools, which is ok for most of the sculpting tasks.

After struggling some times with different tools, I started to make my own sculpting tools to get exactly the tools I need. Because I saw in other blogs and on different forums that "the right sculpting tools" is an interesting point for a lot of people, I decided to start this little Blog to share some of my ideas with the community and hopefully inspire some people to make there own sculpting tools.

So that´s was this Blog is all about. In the coming weeks, you will find here some tutorials on how to do your own sculpting tools.

I´m on holidays untill 2009.06.19., but after that I will start here with my first tutorials.

Comments are very welcome

RingerT