Creating Rihannon Rose!

The first steps to creating my character was to re-draw out her proportions in a diagram as well as her muscle mass. I found this was really useful as drawing her real size onto paper then allowed for me to measure the lengths I needed from it.













Here you can see that I made me skeleton from wire and here I lay it on top of my drawing so I could see that it matched up perfectly. There were two different types of wire available for me to use, thick and thinner wire. However, I found that using thicker wire where my character needs support, such as her spine and legs is a better option and using the thinner, easier to move wire in the arms where there will need to be more motion.

Here is my skeleton again, and my next step was the form the muscles and body onto my frame!

 

Here you can see that I created my body mass using a  mixture of Styrofoam and milliput. The styrofoam worked best for bulky areas such as the chest as it was solid and easy to carve into my desired shape and the milliput was good for covering sharp wires and sticking the bolts on to the feet. I attached bolts to my character so that it would have a base to stand on when coming to animating in a later stage. I also wrapped the styrofoam in rough plaster material, and this was to ensure that the plasticine would stick to my model effectively and easily.


Here is the final model before plasticine and as you can see it is completely covered in the plaster material!

 So my next steps I began to create my character with plasticine and this was quite challenging at first as I wanted my character to look smooth but just a wrong slip of the finger and it could mess up the whole face. I really enjoyed the whole process, and after a while of modelling I started to get better and more confident. I found that rolling out the plasticine and then layering it on piece by piece really helped for my to get my character modelled quicker.

 

So, here is my final model of my character Rihannon Rose! I am really pleased with how she turned out and to finish off I rubbed on olive oil to the plasticine to smooth it out and it worked really well, however you only need a tiny drop for a large area as it's easy to put too much on. I feel that I have really learnt during this workshop and I now feel much more confident with the stages of physically making a character.