LARGER SCULPTING TOOLS

When I started this blog here, I made it about tools for sculpting in small scales like 30mm or 54mm scale. But there are also a lot of people around, who do sculpting in a quite larger scale. Especially comic-style characters are quite popular. A lot of these people do their stuff with super sculpey or super sculpey firm (grey). The height of these Marquette’s is 15 cm and above. I found this interesting and so I would like to try out some sculpting in a larger scale on my own.

For that I thought about a simple sculpting tool for getting started with larger sculpts.

I had a look on the web for tools that other people use for that kind of sculpting and decided to make my own two sided tool.

In the end it is just a two sided tool made of a stainless steel rod with 5 mm diameter and with a “finger-tip” on one end and a “sculpting-knife”-tip on the other.

I made it this way:

First I took a stainless steel rod with 5 mm diameter and cut of a piece with about 17 cm length. Maybe it’s a bit too long, so you do it just a bit shorter.

After that, I fixed the rod into an electrical drilling machine, set it into rotation and pressed it slightly onto a grinding machine, like you can see on the next picture.

By doing this, I formed a pointed tip on one end of the stainless steel stick.

After that, I just flattened the end of the stick. To do so, I heated the pointed end of the stick up until it glows and than hammered it down on an anvil. It’s just the same procedure as I’ve explained for making 1mm tool tips (look there: “the finger tool”) beside the fact, that this time the steel has a much larger diameter. The flattened end looked like that:

Then I moved to the other side of the stick. This end, I grinded down a bit as you can see on the next picture. The idea here is to give the end already the rough shape of the later blade of the sculpting knife. I use also the grinding machine to get this done. It’s better to “pre-shape” the steel that way because it saves you a lot of work later and helps you, to get the right shape.

After that, this end was also flattened with heat, hammer and anvil. Again it’s the same as I’ve explained in my post about the 1mm tool-tips for the “sculpting knife” just in a larger scale. The flattened end looks like that:

After doing the forging work, I had to refine the two ends of the tool with the grinding machine. After that, the tool looked like that:

Finally I used abrasive paper and a polishing machine to remove all scratches from the tool and to give it a clean surface. In the end it looked like you can see on the next picture.

After that, the new tool was done. As I said before, it has a diameter of 5 mm, which is ok for most hands (except troll and orc).

I made two alternative versions of the tool.

The first alternative was made of stainless steel which profile wasn’t round but hexagonal (like a screw nut). The screw-wrench size of this hexagonal steel rod was also 5mm which makes it a little larger in the hand than a round 5mm rod. Beside that some people prefer a hexagonal grip on their tools for having a better control over the tool.

If you want to use such a hexagonal steel rod, I suggest grinding down the tool ends to a round shape before forging the tool ends. This helps to flatten the ends more evenly.

The tool from the hexagonal steel rod looks like that:

For the other alternative I used a round profile stainless steel rod again, but this time smaller with a 4 mm diameter. There’s nothing special to explain here because the procedure is the same as I’ve explained for the first tool. This tool looks like that.

So the tools I’ve made by now have a diameter or “grip size” of 5mm and 4 mm.

Maybe you prefer tools with a larger diameter at least at the handle. If so, here are two ways to get a thicker handle on these tools:

1.

You can just “add” a larger diameter to this tool, by using a heat shrink tube (I hope, this is the right word in English for it).

A heat shrink tube is a tube / hose made of some kind of rubber-like material. If heat is applied on it, the diameter of this tube shrinks down. There are different kinds of heat shrink tubes around. I suggest getting those with a high shrinking ratio. I took one with a 4/1 shrinking ratio. That means, the diameter of the tube was originally 16 mm. After heating it up, it shrinks down to 4mm diameter. The shrinkage in the length direction is much less. It’s less than 10% (at least for the heat shrink tube I use).

I also choose a heat shrinking tube with hot glue already applied to the inside of the tube. This helps to fix the rubber grip very tightly to the steel.

I bought this heat shrink tube on ebay.

I cut up a piece of the tube that is just a little bit longer than I want for the final “grip”.

I just pulled it over the tools handle and applied heat on it. I used a heat gun for that like that. That’s a kind of hard-core hair dryer that produce much more heat than a usual hair dryer. I guess you need about 120 to 150 ° (Celsius) for activating the shrinkage.

While applying the heat on it the diameter of the tube starts to shrink dramatically until it sits on the metal tool very tightly (even more because of the heat glue inside the tube).

Because I choose a quite large heat shrink tube, the final diameter of the tool grip was quite large. So after that my new tool has a diameter of about 8 mm, that’s the same as the handles of hobby knifes like x-acto or Martor etc. Finally you just have to cut of a part of the tube away on each end, if it is too long. The final tool looks like that:

Here you can see the relation of the original heat shrink tube before and after heating it up:

I just made two other tools in smaller sizes that way. One is made of 4 mm steel, and one of 3.5 mm steel. For those I took heat shrink tube with the size 12/3 mm (12mm before heating / 3mm after heating).

2.

For the second version I used once again an aluminium tube as a handle.

I made this handle for the smaller tool made of 4mm steel, because this might be a bit too thin for the hands.

I took an aluminium tube with an outer diameter of 8mm and an inner diameter of 4 mm (Material strength = 2mm). I just cut off a piece of that tube with the desired handle-length and rounded up the ends. Once again I’ve done this by fixing it into the electrical power drill an hold it slightly onto an electrical grinding stone machine like I’ve explained above for giving the steel rod a pointy tip.

After that, I just cut the forged tool in the middle and glued each part into one end of the aluminium too with good metal glue.

If you want to make a lighter tool, just cut off a little more of the non-forged side of each tool tip before gluing it into the aluminium handle.

You can do just the same with a 5mm diameter tool. For that you just need an aluminium tube with an outer diameter of 8 mm and an inner diameter of 5mm (material strength = 1,5mm). If you can’t find that size, you can do it with a tube combination (a tube with outer diameter = 6mm and an inner size = 5 mm inside a tube with outer diameter = 8mm and inner diameter of 6mm).

I’ve explained that in the post about “tool handles”.

On the last pic for today, You can see all tools from this tutorial:

That’s all about my first excursion into larger tools for sculpting.

EBOOK UPDATED

After the last tutorial about stamp tools and press moulds, I've updated my downloadable ebook.

The ebook now contains all tutorials from my blog again.

As before, you can download the ebook for free for personal use. Any use in a commercial sense is not allowed without my permission.

I've made different versions of the ebook:

Version one ("_ebook") has a lower resolution and is made to be watched on the screen like an ebook.

Version two ("_print") has a higher resolution for printing it out.

Version three ("_ecoprint") is new. It's also in higher resolution for print, but this time the book is written on plain white paper instead of the coloured and structured background of the original. I made this for those who didn't want to waste too much printer ink when printing it out, because now only the pictures and the words have to be printed and not the background.

The "_ebook" and "_print" version looks like this:

The "_ecoprint" version looks like this:

Here are the downloadlinks for the ebook:

MAKE_YOUR_OWN_SCULPTING_TOOLS_ebook.pdf

MAKE_YOUR_OWN_SCULPTING_TOOLS_print.pdf

MAKE_YOUR_OWN_SCULPTING_TOOLS_ecoprint.pdf


I hope, you will like this.
Any comments remarks or critiques are highly welcome

STAMP TOOLS – PRESS MOULDS

Welcome back.

Today I want to talk a little bit about what I called stamp tools.

In a former tutorial I told you how to make the “rivet tool” (see tutorial about making 1 mm tool tips). This rivet tool is nothing more than a tiny tube that makes rivet-like shapes if pressed down into the putty like a stamp. So the rivet tool is a most basic kind of stamp tool.





Basically a stamp tool is an object with some kind of structured or engraved surface.
If you press it on or into your putty, it leaves a mirrored-inverted mark on the putty.
By using stamp tools, you can save a lot of time and you can do details that are nearly impossible to achieve by trying to do them by hand (unless you are Tom Meier).

Especially if you need a homogeneously structured surface (like some kind of rough fabric) or if you need a lot of exactly the same pattern (like a symbol on several shields or on the armour) stamp tools can save your day.

But one advice right from the beginning: Don’t overdo using stamp tools on your sculpture.
Stamp tools are a fine addition to your sculpting tool set, but the results are the best if you use them sparingly

In general a lot of things could be used as stamp tools. You should have a look for small objects with interesting surface structures or with engraved objects and you have to experiment a little by pressing them on your putty to see, what effect could be achieved with them.

For example I found a piece of rubber that has an interesting rough structure on its backside.
When I pressed it on my procreate putty, I found out, that the result looks exactly like braided willows (the kind baskets are made of).







Other interesting structures could be achieved by using for example rough sandpaper (abrasive paper) that is pressed onto the putty.

Or have a look on this structure:






used an old toothbrush for that.

If you think a while about this technique, I’m sure you will find some nice uses for that, so I won’t talk too much about all the possibilities for using stamp tools.

Beside stamp tools there are so called press moulds. As the name indicates, a press mould is a kind of small mould (usually a one-piece-mould) where the putty could be pressed in to give it a special shape. So as the idea is the same as for the stamp-tools, there is no really difference between a stamp tool and a press mould.

Maybe you can say, the difference is how to use it. If you press it into the putty, it is a stamp tool and if you press the putty into it, it’s a press mould. Generally a press mould is larger to form the whole shape (like a complete shield or a complete weapon) while the stamp tool is usually used to form smaller things like a part of a structure (rivet). Anyway, those categorisations are only of academically interest as both are sculpting aids that use the same principals.

So in the following, I want to give you a few examples about what can be done with stamp tools (from now on I will only say “stamp tool” as a synonym for stamp tool and press mould).


THE CELTIC PATTERN

This is a little bit more sophisticated way to make a stamp tool.

The idea was to use a technical trick to get some details that are hard to sculpt by hand. I wanted to have a Celtic-pattern-like structure on the clothes of a dwarf that I’ve sculpted. Celtic knot-like patterns are beautiful, but hard to sculpt, because it’s a kind of braided structure that has to be exactly symmetrical to look good. And to sculpt such a symmetrical structure by hand is really hard.

So I thought about a way to get a perfect symmetrically Celtic knot pattern.
Then one day when I was walking home from the city, I passed a shop where you can copy keys and where you can order these small engraved name plates made of plastic that are placed beside the doorbell. In the shop-window, I saw examples of these name plates and I saw, that not only letters can be engraved on these plates, but also little symbols and icons. So I went into the shop and ask how these plates are made.

It is quite interesting. The plates are made with a machine that uses a laser to carve out the letters and icons from the plastic sheet. Even more interesting is that nearly every black and white icon, drawing or pattern can be carved out of the plastic. You just need the drawing or icon in digital form (like .jpg, .tiff or even better some vector graphic file formats from corel-draw of inkscape). The black parts will be cut (or better: engraved) while the white parts remain. The laser engraving machine is connected to a PC that runs a special graphic software. The digital graphic (tiff, jpg, …) will be imported into this software. Then the size for the output and the “deepness” for the engraving (that indicates, how often the laser “runs” over the same spot) are set. After that just the pres of a button starts the engraving-process and the desired shape will be cut out of a large sheet of plastic (some of this plastic sheets have a thin metal coat to give them a metal-look. That’s why on the following pictures they seem to be made out of brass).

Because you can adjust the size of the desired shape in the software, you can engrave really small structures. Just make your original graphic a little larger to get a clean shape. Of course it’s the best to use a vector graphic file format because it can be scaled without loss of quality.

So I came to the idea, to create a Celtic knot pattern with a graphic software on my pc and to use it to get such a carved out plate from it.

So I started with making the Celtic pattern, you see on the next pic.






You don’t have to fight with software to get this done. There are several kinds of “KnotCreators” available on the internet. Some of them are webtools, where you don’t need to download and install anything. You can directly start to create a Celtic knot online.
Try Google to find them.

With this pattern I went to the shop and the guy there made a “name plate” from it (see next pic.). The guy was very friendly and interested in what I wanted to try, so I only paid a few cents for that plate. But I guess the usual price for that would be about a few EUROS.






The rest of the story is quite simple. I mixed some putty (procreate in this case) and pressed it onto the plate.

Then I sprayed !!! cooling spray !!! onto the putty. This trick makes the putty quite hard for a few seconds. This short time I used to peel of the putty from the plate. Don’t use too much cooling spray. If the putty gets too frozen, it could break.






After that I cut the putty stripe with the new Celtic knot structure into shape and fixed it onto the dwarfs clothes. The whole thing looks like you can see on the next pic.





I used the same “stamp” to create a decorated sword scabbard for a halfling sculpt as you can see on the next pic






THE “BOOK OF GOLD”

As the Celtic knot pattern worked quite well, I just tried another stamp tool.
For the dwarf I’ve sculpted, I wanted a small book that is bound onto his backpack.
The book should have an embossed readable title and some embossed decoration.
The “title” should be “GOLD” (as a tribute to the dwarfs in Terry Pratchetts “Discworld”, who are quite mad about gold)

So first I made a simple graphic of the book cover with the word “gold” on it and some decoration you can see far left on the next picture. Then I mirrored this graphic before I created an engraved plate from. That’s important. Otherwise the stamp tool would have produced a book cover with mirrored letters.

The rest is exactly the same like I’ve explained for the Celtic knot pattern.
In the end it looks like that:






As you might have noticed, for his „stamp“ I didn’t used the hard plastic to engrave the pattern in. The grey material, you can see on the picture above is the rubber, that real stamps are made of (I mean those that work with colour on paper). This material can also be used, because with those engraving machines not only name plates can be cut, but also traditional stamps with letters or symbols. Because this rubber is more flexible that the plastic for the name plates, in some cases it might be better to use this rubber.


OTHER IDEAS FOR STAMP TOOLS

Once you got familiar with the principles of the stamp tools, you’ll discover a lot of things that can be done with stamp tools this way.

For example you can make a stamp for tiny insects like spiders or little lizards. This would be a nice addition to the base of a sculpting (or even on a plate armour or shield), see the next pic.





For shields and armour the shapes of dragons, unicorns eagles, griffins are ideal.

Here are some examples I found on the web:





Basically you need a quite simple black and white drawing. You can draw this on your PC with a 2d graphic program. If you don’t want to draw them on your own from scratch, here’s a tip for you: Have a look for “dingbats” and “wingdings” on Google’s picture search. Here you’ll find tons of little icons and symbols that can be used perfectly as a template for a stamp tool. There can also all kinds of mythical creatures be found. But be sure to respect the copyright. So only use those stuff, that is open source or free to use. Or use it only for inspiration to create your own stuff.

If you make very small stamp-tools, it might be useful to fix them on a kind of handle.
For that I used a simple piece of wood and glued a stamp on each side. One tip for that: Make a sign (like a little dot or something like that) on the handle that indicates where the top of the stamp is. Otherwise you would have problems to place the stamp exactly on the putty.





I guess that should be enough to give you an idea about what this technique could be used for.
I confess that the stamps you can see in this tutorial are really small. You don’t have to do them as small, but I wanted to test, how small I can go while still getting good results.

In some cases, the stamp could be a start for a detail that has to be worked over to get good results. So always have a look on your “stamped” pattern, if it could use some improvements by hand. For example the little lizard you can see on the picture 12 above might need some improvements especially on its feet.

On the last picture for this tutorial, you can see some more stamped pattern for inspiration.






If you like this kind of technique but you don’t have access to such a laser engraver, you can simulate this effect by using Fimo or Super Sculpy to make your press mould.

Just roll out flat a piece of Fimo/Sculpy and press holes and patterns into it by hand. If you got your (negative) structure, just harden the Fimo/Sculpy in the oven and your press mould is ready to be used.

Of course you could also user Greenstuff or Pro Create for that, but if you user Greenstuff or Procreate for your sculpting and also for the pressmould you might get the problem, that the putty sticks too much in the mould when it is made out of the same material. So better use Fimo or Super Sculpy for the mould, because Greenstuff and Procreate will stick much less in it.

Scibor made a nice little tutorial about this way to make a press mould with lots of pictures that explain this technique much better than my words. You’ll find it on his website in the articles section:

http://www.sciborminiatures.com

If want to do a larger press mould maybe to reproduce larger parts, there’s another material, that such a press mould could be made of. If you have a look around, you can find a special two-part silicon rubber. This rubber is made of two components that are not fluid, but have a putty-like consistence. When you knead these two parts together, the silicone will harden in a few minutes to a rubber-like consistence. So you can use this kind of silicone to create press moulds quite fast even those with a more complex shape and undercuts. Unfortunately this silicone rubber isn’t cheap. But you can also try eBay for that. These kind of knead-silicone is available for hobby-purposes and modelling but you can also find them in the dentists supply (eBay). If you want to buy some of this keep an I on the final hardness (shore-hardness) I recommend not to use those silicones that are too hard, because they aren’t as flexible and might break faster especially when it comes to undercuts.

You can sculpt a small pattern or detail with greenstuff or procreate once and then make a press-mould to reproduce it several times with this kind of knead-silicone.

One last tip: When you make your own press mould or stamp tool, remember that it will work like a stamp.
That means the mould has to represent the negative of would you would like to achieve.
You have to keep this in mind otherwise your pattern will be “mirrored” later and this is something you won’t like especially if your pattern contains letters. So if you’ve created your desired pattern in Photoshop or Coral Draw (or similar) be sure to “mirror” it before you hand it to the guy with the laser engraving machine.

FREE EBOOK - "MAKE YOUR OWN SCULPTING TOOLS"

Hi again,

Today I will not present any new tutorial about making sculpting tools.

But I have another goody for you.

When I have a look on my blog I discovered, that it is a bit hard to read, if you didn’t start right at the beginning with the first posts.

In newer posts I refer to what I’ve wrote in older posts sometimes and If you haven’t read this older post it might be hard to understand.

That’s why I come to the decision to merge all the posts and tutorials so far in one file and to offer the whole thing to you as a pdf-file.

So that’s the news for today:

You can download all the tutorials in this blog so far as an eBook.

This eBook has 128 pages and it is called:


“MAKE YOUR OWN SCULPTING TOOLS – a guide about how to build sculpting tools for sculpting in small scales”

The download is completely free for using it privately. Of course any reprint or any use in a commercial sense of the eBook itself or its content is only allowed with my explicit permission.

I’ve made two versions of the eBook with different resolution, one for reading it as an eBook on your screen and the other with a higher resolution for printing it out.

Here are the download links (right click, save target...):

MAKE YOUR OWN SCULPTING TOOLS – eBook (pdf: 8.32 MB)

MAKE YOUR OWN SCULPTING TOOLS – print version (pdf: 15.2 MB)

I hope you like this

THE SCHELLERT ARMATURE

THE SCHELLERT ARMATURE

Today I want to talk a little bit about armatures for sculpting miniatures.

I guess most of you are familiar with the basic aspects of sculpting miniatures. So you surely know that you’ll need a solid foundation for putting your putty on if you want to sculpt a humanoid miniature (and not only a “blob”).

There are two alternatives for such a foundation.

1. You can take a so called dolly. That’s a skeleton-like substructure cast from white metal. There are several different versions of these dollies available from different manufacturers (for example: Reaper, Ebob, or Hasslefree Miniatures to name a few).The advantage of the dollies is that you don’t have to worry about proportions, because you can use them just like they are. The disadvantage is, that because of the material, they are made of, they break quite easily when you try to bend them to get the limps into the pose you want to have. Because of that, some (more extreme) poses can’t be sculpted with these dollies. Another disadvantage comes from the preset proportions, because only small variants are possible.






2. The second way to build a foundation for your sculpt is to make an wire armature from scratch. Usually two pieces of wire are twisted together so the twisted part forms the torso, while the wire ends are bent to form arms and legs (pic. 2).


The advantage of these wire armatures is that you can do every pose you like. The wire can be bended easily into the needed position without breaking. You also can do every variant of size and proportions because you do it all from scratch and so there’s no restriction to pre-cast proportions. In reverse, the disadvantage is that you have to find the right proportion again every time you do a new armature. Another disadvantage is that it is difficult to get a “5 point armature” (1 head, 2 arms, 2 legs) from twisting two pieces of wire together. Usually you can choose between a “3 point armature” (head and legs) or a “4 point armature” (two arms and two legs). In both case you have to add an armature/wire for the arms (3-point armature) or the head (4-point armature) later.






So both, dolly and armature have their advantages and disadvantages and I thought about a way to combine the advantages of both, while eliminating the disadvantages.

So I came to the idea to cast my own “dolly” with cast-in wire parts for the arms and legs.
The advantage of this hybrid-armature is that you got a “5 point armature” with some proportions, but also with legs and arms, that could be bent without breaking.

I developed two versions of this kind of armature (I call it “Schellert-armature” because of my last name). The first version has a complete torso including hips while the other ones torso exists only of head, neck and ribcage.

The first has more given proportions while the other one allows more adjustments regarding the height. On pic. 3 you can see the two versions and their use.





I admit that it’s a bit of work until you get such a hybrid armature because you have to do a “master”, build a drop-casting mould from it and then cast the armature. Maybe it’s too much work if you just sculpt a few miniatures. But once you’ve got the mould, you can cast as much armatures as you like quite fast. So if you need some more armatures for your work, maybe it’s worth to invest the time.

So this is how you can make your own “Schellert-armature”:
I assume that you are familiar with the process of making drop cast moulds from heat resistant rtv-silicone rubber, because I won’t describe that. If not, there are lots of tutorials that can be found on the internet. It’s really not as complicated as it might look on first view.

First of all you need an “original” of the armature. Instead of wasting many words about how this has to be made, I just show you in pic. 4 how my master-armatures look like.







To fix the wire parts, I just drill in small holes into the sculpted part and glued the wire in. I used wire with a diameter of 0.8 mm for that.

To make it clear:
For the original, I took 4 pieces of wire and glue each of them into a hole that I’ve drilled into the “torso”. For casting the armatures, I only use two pieces of wire. These two pieces are twice as long as one of the 4 wires used for the original. These longer wires are bent and will be placed into the mould before closing it. Then the molten metal will be cast into the mould and around the wire parts, so they will be fixed tight into the torso of the cast armature.

I made two different versions of the Schellert-armature that I called x-type and y-type.

The x-type has a full torso with head, chest Spine and hips. So while the size of the torso is fixed on this “dolly”, you can do a little variation with the length of the arms and legs (wire parts).

The y-type torso exists only of the head and chest without casted spine and hips.
Instead of the spine and hips there are only the wire parts. On this version you can also do variations to the length of the torso, because spine and hips have to be formed out of the wire, so you can choose the length of the spine. So with this kind of armature, you can do miniatures with different sizes (see pic. 3 above).


So the trick regarding the wire parts is that when the metal is cast around them, they are perfectly fixed.

On the x-type armature, the two arms are made from a single piece of wire as well as the two legs.

On the y-type armature left arm and left leg on the one side and right arm and right leg on the other are each made of a single piece of wire.

If you have problems sculpting the torso or if you are unsure about the proportions, just buy the Reaper-dolly (the “advanced” ones), cut off arms and legs and use the rest as a starting point for sculpting the torso. When the torso is done, just drill in holes and add the wire parts.

Then you have to make a drop cast mould with heat resistant rtv-silicone rubber from it. In relation to a full 30mm miniature, the part of the armature that has to be cast with white metal is quite small and this could be a problem for the casting process. So the white metal that you’ll cast into the mould should have enough “pressure” to fill the whole cavity of the mould. To achieve this I recommend an extra-large gate (sprue) as you can see on pic. 5). If this gate is filled with molten metal, the weight of that metal will give the needed pressure.






While making the mould I also recommend the following:
You have to set the parting line on the object you want to make a mould from to define, what’s in mould half A and what’s in mould half B. Usually you try to set this parting line roughly into the middle of the object to get a well balanced mould.

But in this case you shouldn’t do this. Because later you have to put the wire parts into the mould it would be easier if the cavity that holds the wire is a little deeper. This helps to prevent the wire parts from accidentally falling out of the right place while casting the molten metal in. So try to create your mould in a way, where the wire parts are set predominantly into one mould half (see pic. 5b).




When you’ve got your mould with cut in gate, sprues and air vents you can try your first cast. Before you cast the white metal into your mould, you have to place two bent pieces of wire inside the mould as you can see on pic. 6a and 6b).









First you have to straighten the two pieces of wire. Then you have to bend them at the right point into the needed angle with a flat nose plier. You have to try a little bit to get the right angle. Place the wire parts into one half of the mould at the right position. Then carefully close the mould without letting the wire parts slip out of their positions.

Now fix the closed mould with rubber rings or a clamp or something like that and cast the molten white metal in.

The alloy I use contains lead. Personally I prefer this because the casted armature could be bent better when it contains lead and also the mould cavity is filled better because of the lead. If you don’t want an alloy with lead because of health issues, try a lead free alloy. Personally I’ve got no experience with lead free alloys for casting this kind of armature.

When the metal has cooled down and you open your mould, the white metal should have enclosed the wire parts. Remove the gate and the sprues and your armature is done (pic. 7).






If your armature didn’t come out right from the mould, it’s maybe because the mould is too cold in the beginning, so just try again. After some casts, the mould should get its working temperature. If the results are still not good, try to widen the cut, where the gate “touches” the cavity and/or cut some additional air vents.

That’s all. Now you got your mould and you can cast as many armatures as you like.
If you got plenty of them, you can use them also to do a pose study, just by trying out some poses to see how they will look. Because you already have the basic shape of a human (head, torso arms and legs) it’s easier to get an idea about how a miniature with this pose will look like.

FINGER TOOL FROM A DENTIST PROBE

Sculpting tool made from a dentist probe

Today I post just a quite small and simple tutorial about how to modify a dentist probe to get a sculpting tool that's quite similar to the "finger tool" I've talked before (see post about making sculpting tool tips from 1 mm steel).

But even this tutorial is quite simple, the tool you get is quite good. At least I use this tool quite often. So this tool might be ideal for those who didn't want to do all this tool tip forging and handle making I've talked about in former posts to get a sculpting tool.

As a starting point for this tool, you'll need a simple dentist probe like the one you can see on the following pic. 1). You can find it quite simple with Google or on eBay.





You have to cut the tip of this probe a few mm behind the first bending of the tip like you can see on pic. 2). Then you have to grind down the cut end of the tip to flatten it.

You can use a rotary tool with a grinding stone or just abrasive paper for that.






Just give it a smooth surface and round off all edges.

Finaly the tip should look like those you can see on pic. 3) and pic. 4).

Be sure to give it a clean surface with no scratches left.

Work with fine abrasive paper or even better with fine abrasive pads and finally do some polishing to achieve this.

As I said before, this is a kind of "finger-tool". It's quite similar to the tip that can be found on the famous "Wax 5" but it is much smaller. So you can do quite delicate work with it.

On the next picture you can see a comparison of this tool and the "SG" dentist tool from Tiranti ("Wax 5").

I hope, you'll like this tool.

It's only a little bit of work but you'll get a lot with it.

HOBBY KNIFE BLADE AS A SCULPTING TOOL

Sculpting tool tip made from a hobby knife blade

In this tutorial I want to show you how to make a very nice sculpting tool from a hobby knife blade.

Maybe some of you already know this or even use this kind of tool because it is quite common.

Even Tom Meier who is known to use only quite a few different tools to do his ingenious miniature sculptures uses this tool. If you want to know, how exactly Tom Meier’s tool looks like, have a look on his blog. He has posted a photo of his tools there.

It is quite simple to make this tool. All you need is a blade for a hobby knife (x-acto-style), some sheets of abrasive paper and a little patience. A rotary tool with a grinding tool would be helpful.

All you have to do is to blunt the edge of the blade over the whole length.

The blade’s tip is too pointy for sculpting. So you have to grind it down and to give it a slightly rounded shape. Instead of doing the whole process with the abrasive paper, you can try to carefully break off the tip of the blade with fine flat nose pliers and then to round up the line of breakage with the abrasive paper.

Finally you also have to grind down the sharp edges on the flat sides of the blade and to round them up, so they won’t leave ugly marks in the putty while sculpting.

On the following pic. 1) you can see how to do this.

Just refine the edges and the surface of the grinded blade with very fine abrasive paper or abrasive pads. You can finally polish it, if you like.

This blade has to be placed into a holder for those hobby knife blades (obviously).
You can also use a SCHELLERT-tool as a holder for this sculpting tool tip.

That’s all. This is a nice tool for basic sculpting, like blocking out the rough proportions of a miniature and for blending layers of green stuff or procreate together.