Polymer Clay Vacation

I love what I do, I have the best job in the world. So I'm being proactive and taking a vacation from sculpting anything for at least a month. I have a single custom order to finish in the next few days and then I'm putting away the clay and focusing on drawing, painting, and art education for a full month. Once the month is over I'm going to work on figural non-cephalopod sculpture for another month.

Right now I have my Etsy shop fully stocked (in fact I still have about 50 pieces done that I need to list in the next week or so) so I don't need to make anything right now. A 2 month jewelry making vacation will help me be all refreshed and ready to focus on the holiday season. I've already started this by playing with my new heavy body acrylic paints and making this quick little 7"x5" painting on canvas board of a jellyfish swarm and it's already up on Etsy in the brand new Paintings and Prints section.

My current project of the last few days is to work on copying Bargue plates which is a traditional drawing exercise. If you want to learn more about Bargue plates I suggest reading this great thread on ConceptArt. I'm not doing these with quite as precise a method as described because part of what I am doing is an exercise in learning to judge relative distances without laying any measurement devise down directly on the plate I'm copying from. If you are interested in downloading the plates to work from go here.

I've been a Busy Squid

I have an ever growing number of Squidoo sculpting tutorial lenses. Here's the current list, I hope you find them useful.

Polymer Clay Sculpting Tips and Techniques
Techniques for Curing Polymer Clay
Painting Polymer Clay Sculpture
Building Armatures for Polymer Clay Sculpture
Using Liquid Polymer Clay
Polymer Clay Sculpting Tools

And here are some miscellaneous lenses built to be useful for artists.

Taking Successful Photos of your Artwork
Resources for Figure Artists
Resources for Animal Artists

I've also been named a Squidoo Giant Squid which has really motivated me to want to create even more resources for sculptors and artists. So keep a look out here or on Squidoo for them.

Pinning down Proportions

Jeff LaMarche has two great articles on proportions that are must reads if you are sculpting or drawing the human figure.

Canons of Proportion and the Ideal, Part 1 covers the systems of ideal proportions laid out through history. The Egyptians, Greek, Vitruvius, etc.

Canons of Proportions II - Faith-Based Canons? takes data from real people (in this case military personel) to determine what the real average human proportions and standard range most people fall into.