Creating the perfect sculpture relies a lot on the armature beneath, the medium you use and the amount of detail. Ideally you will want to begin with sketches of what your sculpture will be and what pose it will have, to make my moulding and casting easier and more time efficient I chose a more simplified range of poses. If you had a more complex design a turnaround of sketches would be better to allow you to get the proportions correct.
As my sculpture has a more basic pose, with no overhanging body parts, this made the task of making the armature easier where I can start off with a wooden pole through the middle and just fill out the body mass with wire and tin foil. You will want to have around 5mm of clay around the armature so you need to ensure you don't go overboard with the tin foil otherwise when sculpting you may find unwanted tin foil emerging from parts of the sculpt.
I used armature wire to find the basic shape which I then filled out with tin foil. You can buy a lot of different variations of armature wire, I used some supplied by the university which came in three different thicknesses. It is important to use the correct thickness for the job, for example you would want to use a thick and strong wire for the main body and thin wire for the arms and legs, this however does depend on the design of your sculpture and in some cases tinfoil or wire may not even be needed.
Its exciting to see the process develop from wooden parts and tin foil all the way to the finished sculpt, which would not be possible without the clay! The next part I would like to discuss with you is why I chose to use monster clay as my sculpting medium. Having tried out many different types of clays like wet clay, Fimo, Plasterline, Super Sculpey, Chavant, and Monster Clay, they all have their advantages and disadvantages. I needed a clay which wouldn't distort or mark when going through the mould making process so that ruled out wet clay and Plasterline as they are both quite soft. On the other end of the spectrum is Fimo and Super Sculpey which you sculpt and bake it to go hard, I didn't want to use either of these as they are quite brittle and the delicate parts of the sculpt could snap and break and I couldn't afford that to happen on my time limit. My last options are Chavant and Monster Clay and this was an easy choice as I prefer the more waxy feel and movement of Monster Clay and believed that I would get the best results with the clay I was most comfortable with which is what I would advise anyone to do in the same situation.
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