Detailing and Skin Textures

his article was revised in October of 2001. Probably the best technique for figuring out how to finish sculptures is to study model kits and other sculptures to see if you can figure out how the sculptor achieved that effect. I'll never forget, after I had been sculpting for a while, studying the head and neck of the Horizon Apatosaurus kit (pictured below) and thinking, "Hey! I recognize that. Sculpey bead texture!"

The scales/bumps underneath the cheekbone were done by applying small flattened beads of sculpey, then softening and blending them with a solvent

Here's an area where the "Wayne the Dane" videotapes will probably be of most use to the beginning sculptor. As I've noted, these tapes suffer from poor production values and the eccentricities of Wayne Hansen (he's a nice guy, though), but they do contain a lot of valuable shortcuts and tricks. Try his two-tape Human anatomy/Predator sculpting video for information on a variety of skin textures and for info on sculpting armor and devices. You can find info on the Wayne the Dane tapes in the terminology list in either the workshop or the model shop pages of this website. I've also got links to Wayne's web site on the Links page.

I also want to pass along a bit of valuable advice I got from the Shiflett Brothers: try to make your sculpture look as natural as possible. Don't leave anything on the sculpture that can be clearly identified as a "tool mark." An example of this would be the common practice of using a narrow-gauge brass tube (or coffee stirrers) and pressing circles into the clay to create scales. Unfortunately, this technique often looks too uniform (scales on any reptilian monster or dinosaur come in varying sizes and shapes) and it's pretty clear you were using a tool. One instance where you can get away with this to some degree is when you're combining a lot of skin textures all at once. Check out the skin detail of the Horizon Jurassic Park Dilophosaurus (Spitter) to see what I mean.

Most of these marks were done with a round tube, but they're small enough (this photo is enlarged) and mixed with other techniques enough to disguise them sufficiently

Use lighter fluid or 90% isopropyl (rubbing) alcohol to soften your tool marks and make them look more natural. Brush the solvent on lightly with a soft brush, remembering not to overdo it. Lighter fluid is a bit more agressive than alcohol.

Smoothing

One of the hardest things I had to learn when I first started sculpting with Super Sculpey was how to get the surface uniformly smooth. It seemed like no matter what I did, the clay ended up with an uneven surface, filled with dips and bumps. The remedy for this is simply to continually smooth the surface with your fingers. For the depressions, flatten out a bit of clay between your fingers and apply it to the depression, then smooth it over so it blends with the surrounding clay. If you keep doing this, and on a large piece it will take a while, the surface will begin to smooth out for you. Use medium- or small-diameter brass or aluminum tubing for smoothing curved areas. Roll the tubing gently back and forth across the surface. For smoothing tight areas where your fingers can't reach, I have a couple of suggestions. The first is probably the best: a Q-tip dipped in water. You can use this to smooth and even shape the clay--it's great for faces. When the Q-tip begins to unravel, just switch to a fresh one (you can also use a soft brush with water, too). To smooth larger areas, use a small square of Scotchbrite pad dipped in lighter fluid and gently scrub the surface to make it uniform. This will leave fine grooves in the surface of the clay. You can smooth these with your finger (light pressure) and/or a soft brush dipped in lighter fluid.

Lighter fluid and/orisopropyl alcohol can also get rid of Sculpey crumbs and fingerprints in your sculpture. Lighter fluid is more aggressive than the alcohol., so keep that in mind. Apply sparingly with a soft brush and work the bristles gently over the surface to melt the outer layer of sculpey. Go easy on the solvent, as you can obliterate detail by adding too much. You can, in a pinch, use Sculpey dilutent for smoothing, but it's expensive, and I'd recommend you use isopropyl alcohol and/or lighter fluid instead. CAUTION: lighter fluid is extremely inflammable. Don't use it around open flame or heat sources. Keep all sculpting tools, solvents and materials out of the reach of children.

Baked Sculpey can be smoothed by sanding the surface with steel wool. You can buy different grades of steel wool at the hardware store, usually in the paint section. Start with medium grade and follow up with fine grade. Use small wads of wool, and when they start to disintigrate, use a fresh wad. To get into tight spots, grip a bit of steel wool in the jaws of a hemostat and sand with that. You might also try those foam rubber sanding blocks sold in beauty salon supply stores (these are also excellent for sanding resin figures). Wear a dust mask whenever sanding baked Sculpey.

You can add new Sculpey to baked Sculpey and do multiple bakes. This is useful in a variety of situations, especially when you've got detail you want to protect before doing additional sculpting. To help new clay adhere to the baked clay, brush a tiny bit of Vaseline onto the baked clay. The only problem with multiple baking is that it can cause some cracking. But the cracks should be easy to repair. If the area of added clay is small, you can bake it with a heat gun.

Skin Textures

There are many tricks for creating interesting skin textures. I strongly recommend you experiment with a variety of techniques--you'll be surprised at the results.

Human skin: For most figures at 1:6 scale, just smoothing the clay will suffice. Use a Q-tip and water, then follow up with steel wool sanding after baking. For larger pieces such as busts, you'll want to give the skin a slight but noticeable texture. To create pores, try using a stiff nylon bristle brush (those white nylon-bristled fabric dye brushes sold at craft stores are perfect). Press the bristles fairly hard into the surface and you'll have pores. Go over them lightly with some lighter fluid just to soften them a bit. You can create a texture for stretched skin by using your trusty wet Q-tip and drawing it fairly hard along the clay.

Hair: Use a pin, or preferably a dental pick, which is easier to hold, and draw the tip along the clay, creating rows of indentations. The raised areas between these indentantions is your hair. With a steady hand, you can create impressive locks of flowing hair. Remember that hair rests in masses--it's not just one big uniform surface so you'll need to sculpt these masses before you start creating indentations to represent the hair. If you're doing a lot of hair, here's a handy tool: take three pins or needles of the same size and line them up so that they're parallel to each other. Then embed them in a blob of epoxy putty and let it cure. You can drag this three-pin tool along your hair masses to save time.

Veins: Roll out thin snakes of clay with tapered ends. Apply these to your sculpture and blend them partway into the surface. Feather the edges with lighter fluid or alcohol.

Teeth: Roll out cones of Sculpey, place them onto a piece of crumpled tissue paper and bake them. After they cool, press the baked teeth into the still-soft clay of the mouth of your creature. You can use a snake of sculpey for a gumline, and press the teeth into that, if desired. If you want weathered, cracked teeth like those of the asteroid slug in the gallery, mount the teeth on a pushpin with a handle and score the teeth with a pin, X-acto knife or dental tool. Clean up any crumbs of sculpey with lighter fluid or alcohol and then gently ease the finished tooth onto the crumpled tissue paper for baking. This technique is good for making spines and horns, too.

For human teeth, simply use spatula and dental tools to sculpt the teeth. Remember that human teeth have different shapes, so don't sculpt them all like incisors. It's helpful to have a human skull model for both general sculpting reference and for sculpting teeth. Or look at your own teeth in the mirror.

Another technique for doing teeth is to model them already in the mouth, using an X-Acto knife to carve the excess clay away from the teeth.

Wrinkles: Roll out thin snakes of clay and apply these to your sculpture, then blend them together until they resemble wrinkles. Or use a loop tool to cut grooves in the clay surface. Another technique is to apply a bit of Saran Wrap to the surface and then use a dental tool to impress wrinkles into the surface. The plastic wrap lends a smooth texture to the wrinkles. Follow up with alcohol.

Muscle tissue: For exposed muscle tissue, like that seen on some horror kits, use your multi-needle hair tool or a stiff-bristled flat brush (or an old toothbrush) to create a striated pattern on your muscle masses. Soften this effect with alcohol or lighter fluid. You can also use this technique to make convincing wood/bark textures. Create larger striations with a dental tool or spatula, then follow up with a toothbrush, drawing it along the direction of the grain. Follow up with alcohol.

Clothing: Generally you sculpt clothing after you've formed a basic body mass. This body mass doesn't need to be anatomically perfect if the clothing isn't skintight or clingy, but the proportions do need to be there. To sculpt clothing, I highly recommend you look into Burne Hogarth's book Dynamic Wrinkles and Drapery, sold at major bookstores and art supply stores. This book shows how all sorts of clothing bunches up, hangs and wrinkles, and if you follow Hogarth's advice you'll be sculpting realistic clothing. More good clothing advice (especially on the formation of wrinkles) is Modelling and Sculpting the Human Figure by Edouard Lanteri. For sculpting armor and weapons, check out any of a number of books on the subject at the bookstore or library.

Wings: Here's a cool method to create leathey wings, such as those for a dragon or demon. Create a wire framework for the wing with stiff, cloth-covered floral wire. Then take the framework and lay it against a single ply of facial tissue (don't use toilet paper, as it's designed to disintigrate when wet) Using a pencil, carefully draw the outline of your wing, and then carefully cut out the wing. Spot weld the wing to the wire framework in a couple of places using superglue and zip kicker (a fluid sold in hobby shops that causes superglue to harden instantly). Then superglue the rest of the edges of the wing to the framework. Now for the tricky part. Ease a drop or two of superglue (the gel-type superglue works best here) onto the tissue and spread it carefully with a toothpick, allowing the tissue to soak up the glue. Once you've applied your zip kicker, the glue will harden and you're ready to work on another patch. If the tissue tears, that's okay you can repair it a patch of fresh tissue and superglue. When you're done, you should have a membrane-thin wing which is completely impregnated with hardened superglue. You can then apply Sculpey to the framework to make it look like part of your sculpture. If desired, you can actually apply thin sheets of rolled out Sculpey over the wings, too

Scales: There are lots of methods for sculpting scales, and there are a lot of different types of scale textures. Look at the scale patterns on a horned lizard, a snake, a fish and an alligator to see just how diverse scales types and patterns can be. One simple way to convey a scaled pattern is with crosshatching. Simply take a spatula tool or X-Acto knife and incise a series of parallel lines into the skin surface. Then draw a perpendicular set of parallel lines, creating a diamond pattern. Soften up the pattern with alcohol.

I've already groused about using brass tubing to press circles into the clay, but you might have some success with using different diameters of tubing so that you get a more varied pattern of scales. One effective technique I've seen is to crimp the end of a round tube so that it's more squared off, and to use that to create a scale pattern.

Another method is to roll up lots of tiny balls of Sculpey, then flatten them out and apply them to the surface, creating a scaly pattern, as with the Horizon Apatosaurus above (you can also use this method for warts and pebbly skin textures, such as those seen in monsters).

One of the best ways to make scales and skin textures are by using texture stamps. You can make a texture stamp by taking a piece of Sculpey and rolling it into a 3/4" ball. Then taper two ends of the ball so that it looks like a football. Pinch the top of the football into a grip or handle, and then take a ball-tipped tool and create a pattern of depressions in the curved underside of the texture stamp.

Above, enlarged view of two different texture stamps. Note the varying size of the dimples. Below left, side view of texture stamp. Below right, texture left by a stamp in soft clay

For best results, use two or three different sizes of ball-tipped tools to create a varied pattern. Carry the pattern out onto the tapered ends, so you can use those for tight areas. Then gently set your texture stamp onto some crumpled tissue paper and bake it. When it's baked and cooled, spray the textured surface with a couple of protective coats of Testor's Lusterless Laquer spray, so that clay from your sculpture won't adhere to it. After it dries, you're ready to use your texture stamp. Simply press it into the clay to create a convincing pebbly, scaly pattern. My baby raptor in the gallery was textured using a texture stamp.

Texture stamps can be made from many different things. Try making texture stamps with impressions of citrus fruit skins, ceramic tile patterns, pine cones, bark, coral, rocks, pumice, etc. Use your imagination and creativity. You can also use different tools to create textures in your stamps, and actually create stamps that will make feathered patterns, etc.

You can also make single-scale stamps. Roll out a narrow cone of clay and use a ball-tipped tool to impress one dimple in the tip. Bake it and use it for getting into very tight areas that your texture stamp won't reach. For covering large areas (such as those on my Empire Strikes Back asteroid slug), you can create a cylindrical texture stamp by inserting a toothpick through a cylinder of clay and creating a texture on the outside of the cylinder. After baking, roll it along the surface of your sculpture.

One good texture stamp for monster or dinosaur skin is to use gauze bandage. Take a small length and wad it up, then press into your sculpture's skin for a terrific wrinkly texture. Some loose gauze fibers may come off onto the sculpey, but you can easily remove them with tweezers.

Finally, you can create interesting textures by using objects from your house or the craft store as texture stamps. Try painting some lighter fluid on the clay and then pressing foam rubber, household sponge or natural sponge on the surface. Or try dipping a sponge into a small pool of superglue and letting it cure. Then use the stiffened sponge as a texture stamp.

Well, that's about it. I'd like to re-emphasize that one of the most useful things you can do is experiment with a variety of tools and techniques. I sometimes sit and just do that, trying to come up with a neat pattern or texture. I hope you'll have a lot of fun with these techniques, as well as improving the realism and appeal of your sculptures. Good luck!