Knowing that Ponyo is a 5 year old girl I did some research into the average height of a Japanese five year old girl which happens to be 3ft 6in or 106.2cm, I couldn't sculpt a life size child due to the size of my studio workspace and materials required so I decided to scale her down by half. Before making the maquette I determined that it would be 1:3 scale of 53.1 ( 1:2 of 106.2cm) so to make it a quick and easy sculpture that is helpful enough to use the measurements from. The maquette needs to be accurate as possible as I plan to sculpt the head, arms and legs all separately and so this miniature model will be helpful to know everything is the same size it should be.
Below is the process of how I made the maquette, measuring from the drawing I scaled up:
The extra prop that I needed to have on this maquette is the bucket however I had already found and ordered a bucket from amazon that was a perfect size for the bigger Ponyo sculpture and so scaled it down and sculpted a miniature version.
In sculpting this maquette before the larger sculpture, I am able to visualise how Ponyo will look and stand in a three dimensional form and has helped me to work out approaches and materials for how it might be made, for example I now know where the limbs will be cut off to, how the frame will work and how much padding will be needed underneath the clothes.
Comments