FOURTH ENTRY - ONE IS A FOOL, IT MUST BE SAID

I am not sure at this point whether it was the way things were taught to me, or whether it is a notion created through an unclearly stated confusion between working with wire armatures, and steel ball and socket joints. But the fact is that I started work from this notion, that the "correct" order of doing things was to first design the character in scale, on paper, then design the armature to fit this, followed by the assemblage of the armature, and finally to sculpt the figure directly onto the armature.

There are a number of elements in my character design which required special attention, regarding the way the armature works with the surface of the character's skin. I strive for the highest degree of realism, so for certain areas of the anatomy it was important to figure out how the bone structure could work properly with the outer look of the body, and function correctly in movement.

Hence, unfortunately already deep in the assemblage of the armatures, I decided that this bone structure, which is also the light bulking up of the figure under the silicone skin, could only properly be made after the finished figure was sculpted. I thought I could lay wax or plasticine as a skin into the mould, leaving the correct thickness in negative to start sculpting the bones/bulk. Silicone, it seems, is quite heavy, so more light bulk within the puppet is better.

So what has happened so far?

I designed the principal character based on myself, from the scale drawing I made on my father's studio wall. But the four other characters were made up, and this was possibly a disaster. It must be said, if you intend to make a three dimensional object, it is not good enough to just draw one view of it in 2D.

At one point, before fixing in an element of the mostly finished armature, I spent a few hours sculpting half of a bust, to try to see how it would fit with the armature. I believe this is where it became very clear that I had made a major mistake.

Why on earth not sculpt the characters first!?

I suppose this mistake relates to the mistake I made in my last project, Tchaikovsky's Garden, the painted film, where I filmed the live-action for the faces before making the paintings. For months I struggled with trying to work a painterly composition around what had already quickly and blindly been established in the filming. The figures were locked to the positions I had put them in during the filming, and this did not relate to the composition I would otherwise have found in the painting.

In both cases I shot myself in the foot. There is very little freedom in sculpting a figure onto an already established bone structure, if, that is, the bone structure is not absolutely correct. And it is very difficult to make an absolutely correct skeleton, as, well, skeletons are rather hard to study and measure...