Demon Mistress WIP (warning, female character in unsuitable clothing for combat)

[Dust King]

This is going to be the leader of my WIP Demon warband, basically an inquisitor who has found a way to summon and control minor demons without losing her mind or becoming a pawn to the chaos gods. She is a heretic to the imperium and a thief to chaos factions so her character is pretty much out for herself.

Ok, a word about the clothing; most warbands in the group I play Inquisitor with are designed from the point of "what makes sense on the battlefield" (although there are a couple of exceptions). So I thought an interesting 'foil' for these warbands would be someone who no longer cares about the practicality of what they wear, they have enough power to compensate for any benefits they are missing from protective clothing.

So what do you think?

Front


Back


Side


Head



All comments and criticism welcome, feel free to rip into it

[psycho]

cant really rip into it mate....seeing as my own sculpting is limited to...hmmmm...feck all....but it is also hard to comment on something that seems to be a lil fuzzy in the main pic
the general idea behind the character is good....ive used the same idea (kinda) for my own evil Slaaneshi worshipping Female INQ....the one thing im not keen on is the hair mate!
it just seems to be very static...i like the long flowing locks and all but it just doesnt sit right for me


hope it helps dude

kerby

[precinctomega]

Without some idea of how she ought to look when finished, it's hard to comment constructively.  Do you have a concept sketch or illustration?

I think the hands are rather odd.  Sculpting splayed fingers is always challenging.  I'm guessing you're going for long nails, explaining the strange-looking dimensions.  I would heartily recommend not using a sculpting medium to do the nails.  Use plastic shavings.

R.

[greenstuff_gav]

ontop of those two comments, i think you've started the cloak too early; while sculpting  you should work in layers; get the torso and legs detailed up (even if the detail is hidden at the end!)  before starting on any top-coats; more effort, but the sculpt will look better for it

[Dust King]

Thanks for the advice, I agree I probably did the cloak to early, sometimes I rush ahead without thinking when I get an new idea and that happened with the cloak.

The hair is going to be posed more dynamically eventually but I was just checking it fitted on the head before I posed it.

The hands are odd because they are from a genestealer, as they don't look as human as I originally wished I think it would be a good idea to move more towards claws an give her unarmed attacks demonic abilities (because she wont have any other weapons)

Anyway thanks for the advice so far

[MarcoSkoll]

Most warbands in the group I play Inquisitor with are designed from the point of "what makes sense on the battlefield" (although there are a couple of exceptions).

More or less the same here. I try to keep my characters "battle practical" for the most part - the more of a soldier they are, the more practical I try to make them.

The big exception I make is on hairstyles. Although I don't deliberately go for stupid ones, I don't deliberately try to make them practical either. You wouldn't see many braids or ponytails on anyone with serious combat experience (too easy a hand hold - much like security/body guards wear clip-on ties), but I allow them anyway - because else I'd end up with a very limited range of hair style.

I also occasionally draw my characters in my art, and the advantage of long hair here is that it can be used to increase the sense of movement.

So what do you think? All comments and criticism welcome, feel free to rip into it.

Well, I'm going to offer quite a lot of criticisms here. I'm sorry if I come across as overly harsh at times, but I know from experience that a solid constructive criticism is really beneficial to improving.

The first thing is smoothness is critical to GS work. If your work looks smooth, then even if it still has flaws, it can still look great - if it looks neat, then people automatically assume it's good. Goes for a lot of art really.
Quite a lot of your work is pretty rough, so it doesn't do the rest of the model many favours.

You don't need to be super smooth (in the end, the paint job covers some of the flaws), but you do need to put some work into it.
My own technique for smoothing  GS work is to keep around some cheap brushes. I think mine were watercolour brushes bought from WHSmith's art section for a couple of quid. You can either smooth the putty with the brush end (good for removing fingerprints or blending a new layer of putty into an older one), or a lot of the time, you can roll the shaft of the brush over large smooth areas.

The latter is how I do most of my basic shaping.

... and that brings me on to my next point.
While a valiant attempt at replicating the human form, the sculpt's anatomy has a few issues.
I'm perhaps not the best person to talk about this as I know I make mistakes with anatomy at times, but I am improving.

The easiest thing, at least until you get an intuitive sense for it is to have some reference. So, if you're looking to do a lot of sculpting, you might want to pick up some books on anatomy to help you sort this out - although it's not essential.

I personally use two books in my art: "Anatomy for Artists" by Barrington Barber, and "Anatomy for Fantasy Artists" by Glenn Fabry
While the former is more oriented towards life drawing, it has a LOT of pictures of muscle structure and such like to refer to. The latter is more oriented towards drawing from the twisted recesses of your mind, and modifying the basic human structure as appropriate to that, but it has only limited muscle references.

Although either is useful on its own, between them, they've proven very useful. Admittedly, I bought them for my drawing, but they can be turned to my sculpting, just fine. For less than £20 for the pair if bought off Amazon, you could do worse.

However, I'll give you my thoughts on the matter straight off anyway. The problem areas are really the shoulders, the legs and the feet.
The shoulders are far too wide and square. While they might fit on a heavily built male character, they're not really good for a female one, I'm afraid.
The legs are an issue in that they're... too straight is the easiest way to put it. They haven't shape or muscular definition.

If you compare to say these two or this one (yes, I know the sculpts are a little messy), although it's not perfect, you can see the natural undulating curves that make up the shape of the legs.

You should add the basics of muscle definition even if you're later going to sculpt clothes over it, because while the clothes will add to the shapes that are there, they're still defined by the shape of the body underneath them.

In the case of the second figure in the first photo, if you look after clothes have been added, the majority of what you see of the legs is actually pretty much the same as you saw in the last photo - a few creases have been added over the surface, as well as the actual "cuffs" - but I haven't added anything elsewhere.
A good example of what I'm talking about is Ynek's Sophie Vandus - the yellowish resin is the basic muscle shape, and the green stuff is merely adding "the edges" to the clothing. No need to re-sculpt over the whole thing. Except where it's creasing or billowing, for most of our purposes, clothing is too thin a layer anyway for the difference over bare skin to be noticeable. But enough about clothes.

The legs also appear (from the available angles) to lack a protruding knee on her right leg. While none of the bones in the human body are straight, they are still rigid - so, you need to add a sharper knee joint for a bent leg.
Also, for legs that aren't (ahem) spread, there's too much of a gap between them at the top.

The feet are too flat and short. I can't comment much more on feet, given my own inability to draw them reliably.

I'll move on... to the head. Out of interest, where is it actually from?
The hair... it could work as a style if you get it right (I'm reminded of Sluggy Freelance's Oasis), but you will need to add some actual "hair" shape to it - flat surfaces, while a reasonable interpretation of how hair would appear, if scaled down to that size, don't look quite right, so you need to add that whole "hair shape".

Lastly, you'll need to straighten her up, because she does look like she's about to tumble over backwards. And I speak from experience that it's so much easier to fix this before you go too far.

Anyway, I apologise for coming along and giving you what comes across as a short lecture, but I'd sooner give you as much advice as I can than a sanitised version.

[Dust King]

Wow, thanks a lot, I really appreciate the detail of your advice. Don't worry about sounding harsh I can take it

I've taken all the advice into account and have started to redo most of the details. So far I've re-sculpted the legs adding more curves (I think the original curves got lost early on) especially in the calves and I've added knee caps (although I'm not 100% that I've got them right yet). I've also smoothed her abdomen, added a belly button, put a bit more work into her top (it was half finished in the original photos but it didn't show up well). As well as that I've added a bit more texture to her hair (using my fingernail to make the lines instead of the knife I used last time)

I'll be working on her over the week and I'll try and have new photos up next weekend, thanks again everyone for the advice, it really helped

(Oh Marco the head was given to me to me by Aidan, It came from a generic WWII mini (I think))   

[MarcoSkoll]

Wow, thanks a lot, I really appreciate the detail of your advice. Don't worry about sounding harsh I can take it.

No problem. I'm usually happy to come across someone who can actually take criticism - a lot of people get unpleasant. (And as I was trying to help, I often don't feel like being very polite to these people...)
It's often hard to tell the ones who will take criticism the right way and the wrong way apart. I know some advice is hard to receive, but it's often that advice which is the best.

Myself, I like to try and get feedback, because often the case with your own art, at least when starting up, is you can't really see the mistakes (at least until sometime afterwards) although they still nag at you - what you see is corrupted by your idea of what you wanted to draw.

I'm getting good enough at seeing what's actually there, not what I think I see there that I can start to get past this problem...
... the downside is that this applies to anything. Even pieces I wanted to like, or pieces that I used to like - but from which the errors now glare out at me. Still, it does mean that I can try and help others.

Oh Marco the head was given to me to me by Aidan, It came from a generic WWII mini (I think)

Well, the reason I ask is that the focus in the photo isn't great, and I can't really tell whether it's meant to be a male or a female head.

I can very much understand using a pre-made head in this case - a male head is something of a challenge to sculpt, but female faces are doubly so. Although I may well badger you into trying a head/face in the future, you'll probably want to build up some experience first.

[DapperAnarchist]

Talking about soldier hair - a common hair cut among the Lurps in Vietnam (ultra-elite near psychotics, chosen mostly for their self-reliance and their bloodlust) was actually a single braid from the front of the head, narrow one. American Special Forces in Afghanistan apparently keep annoying their commanders by growing beards - but thats to get on better with the locals, and for warmth. The standard Marine chop isn't the only option for realistic soldiers.

But thats offtopic, really. I agree with MarcoSkoll's advice, and just add, that 1) practice makes perfect [/cliche], and 2) use references. Want really long dreads? Go look up photos of people with dreads, or ask a friend if you can play with their dreads, if you know anyone (note - careful how much you play with dreads. It might be taken the wrong way.) For muscle, source picture sites are good, like the source gallery in deviantArt, and Istockphoto, but if you need a very particular pose - get in front of a mirror.

[Ynek]

First of all, I admire your ambition in this piece. In my opinion, scratch sculpting is one of the most rewarding things that a model maker can get into, and anyone who decides to venture into the world of scratch-sculpting deserves all the encouragement and guidance that they can get.

So, in that light, here are a few pointers that I think might do you some good, which I don't think have yet been mentioned.

You may want to learn some basic "comic book" anatomy. At the moment, the arms and legs look a bit like shapeless sausages with hands/feet on the end of them, which is fine for Wallace and Gromit, but not quite as fitting for a character in the 41st millenium.

To give you an idea of how to go about this, I took a few hours to draw up a kind of 'tutorial' of a sort, on how I tend to sculpt human female anatomy. I omitted the arms, because in essence, they're very similar to the legs in principle.


This is a fairly standard practice in miniature sculpting, the use of an armature embedded into a cork. When I looked at the model you were working on, it looks like she's being sculpted onto a bottle top, or some other object that I didn't immediately recognise. The advantage to working with a cork is that it's relatively narrow and small, and thus, it tends not to get in the way of your sculpting tool. If you try to reach up into the armpits or under the crotch to smooth out the GS and you have a big base in the way, it can get a bit frustrating. A nice, small cork is what a lot of miniatures sculptors prefer to work with. This was a small point, and most people who read this will probably think I'm nitpicking, but I thought it was something that you might benefit from knowing.





I'm not entirely sure if drawings of green stuff ladies counts as SFW or not, but as it's educational, I think it's worth posting anyway.



After taking another look at your model, the proportions are actually pretty good. (That's something I still have a lot of problems with.)

Aaaaaand now I've probably convinced a load of you that I'm a blowhard and a bigmouth, but meh. I'm sick, bedridden, and I have nothing better to do with my time.

EDIT:

A good example of what I'm talking about is Ynek's Sophie Vandus

Also, WOOT! for being cited.