Biologically Inspired Sculpture Discussion

#1

Dear Reader:

Without regard to medium, an area of sculpting that has always held a fascination for me has been the technique behind biologically inspired sculpture. I’ll start this thread with a little about me: I am James Johnson. I majored in Computer Animation at the Art Institute of Dallas, where I graduated some time ago in 2004. It was really just a formality that I wore the hat of a Character Modeler the most there. In reality, I did it all. I never liked that title personally; somehow it seems even more dated to say it now than it did then, what with the ever emerging technological innovation of this industry. Straight out of AI, several starting dream offers were made to me. I saved every letter for every position, all of which I politely turned down. Turned out, I posess a high aptitude for electronics and basic mechanical engineering concepts, so the Submarine Electronics and Computers Field fit me like a glove. I opted instead for that. I joined for the same reasons anybody else would, family tradition being one of them. I also wanted to ‘do my part’, see the world, be able to continue my education and do something far more hands-on. I enlisted into the Navy, and chose SECF over the Nuclear Program. I loved it. I had a roaring good time in service! I finished Basic Enlisted Submarine School in flying colors while I did work aboard docked submarines. I kicked ass in the simulations (they are essentially a multi-million dollar video game, after all). I was also a good candidate for the STA-21 program, which would have enabled me to go Officer. I hated to go! Funny how one medical technicality can cut short your career plans for the next half-decade. While I didn’t picture becoming an Honorable Service Veteran so soon and in the way that I did, I thoroughly loved the time I had there and I’m very thankful for it! Stories for the grandkids…

Certainly my time in service was not sculpting, but it gave me an opportunity to do something else I also loved, and carry on the torch of a family tradition. I was able to put yet another ‘gift’ to use. Yet now that I’m home, I find myself picking up another old flame: a career path I had essentially abandoned in order to do my part for my country. I left a potentially successful art career to work on submarines and ultimately specialize in a different computer-related field entirely. Literally all of my time of late has been spent replacing the well-aged content of my 2004 portfolio. Having brought myself back up to speed on many industry standard packages, I learn new software at a lightning pace. That part of me never changed. I was among the top 1-2% of enlisted men able to take part in such a rigorous government program. I got a chance to see and take part in things most people will never see in their lifetimes. Now, here I am: alive, physically healed, and channeling that same exact discipline and structure I had for submarine duty into designing my finest category of meticulously realized omni-medium dimensionals to date.

-James

#2

B.O.B. the Hen:

An example of my own mechanical design abilities upon graduation. For me, most mechanically focused plan work is done through quick scribbles on restaurant napkins or toilet paper or worse. If I have a polished mechanical sketch in my portfolio, it means I went out of my way to create it. To keep it all consistent and straightened out for me, I place little stammering side-notes that outline specific functions and quickly jotted measurements that apparently only I understand, and it’s all so I can quickly draft out the part later, which is where the real work happens. If I’m building a mechanized piece with aesthetics in mind, I like to start out by building my aesthetic base first. I like to think of it as a container I build by using organic shapes and curves I find pleasing. Just go nuts with the creativity. Afterward, I spend the rest of the time filling the form I made with precise function, usually based from real world equipment. The organic shape acts like a container to hold all my junk. It’s like playing a fun puzzle: how tightly can you pack together clockwork precision function inside of an organic enclosure? The chicken character was meant as a fresh take on what constitutes a video game boss. Here you have a real chicken, the body of which is spread thinly among the electronic innards of a brand-new robotic body structure; an extension, something the size of a large tool shed, and exhibiting the brawn of Iron Giant. Think for a second about how a typical chicken might react to becoming this. How destructive would our B.O.B. be, once you revived her. How would having something this powerful become dangerous if left entirely at the command of an easily startled bird that operates on a brain like a pecan. What would it mean to be at such a lofty height for poultry and to be perpetually confused to the point of panic, the way a 3-lb chicken likely would be. She tries to move, and immediately she flees the scene on hearing her own body clanking away in response behind her like a steel elephant. There’s no way for her to escape the scary thing, because it moves when she moves. Throw munitions in the mix and you raise a lot of hell in a gated farming community. So I ask you, what kind of approaches do other artists take when designing Biologically Centric Machinework?

#3

Emotion Incarnate:

Asymmetrical character, fashioned from traditional Sub-D modeling techniques and multiple model sheets derived from photographed Sculpey maquettes. Textured using both custom procedural mat settings and the Digimation Quickdirt Plug-in in Max 6. This guy was made using the same Sub-D techniques learned from courseware in class, only I never used the symmetry function. That, and I used multiple model sheet scaffolds to build each limb separately and later re-combine them in Max. Today of course, there are far faster and more effective ways to design this type of character. In terms of organic design, Emotion Incarnate for me was more an exercise in ‘stretching’ what I knew about human anatomy, without necessarily maintaining a sense of plausibility in the process.

#4

Another View of Emotion Incarnate. Unless you’re just dying to see what an ancient, assymetrical, pre-PolyBoost Sub-d cage out of Max 6 looks like, I probably won’t post it. Although the cage for this character is surprisingly clean. I’ll move on to the last sample of past CG work before I show you other mediums from then.

#5

Genetically Aided Hunting:

Lycanthropic survivalist character, based from outside concept art assigned to me in class. Again, it’s traditional Sub-D modeling and model sheet references from a Sculpey maquette. In school, this was my first attempt at marrying mechanical designs with a character. I don’t remember a whole lot about the actual assignment, except that I was to create this character, who was to partake in fierce guerilla warfare with other animal races on a desolate homeworld for unregulated access to the sole remaining viable food source: some immune sub-species of grub worm, I think. The other races included something like sharks and bird people and whatnot; something about a land, sea, and air theme. My old roommate Charlton had the shark. Frankly, were I in that plot situation, I’d be thinking, “Yuck. So I’m looking at malnutrition, blood-shed and the prospect of chomping down on fresh larvae every day for the rest of my natural life? Yeah…so how about that jazz on space travel? Nutty.”

#6

Alternate view of Genetically Aided Hunting. Interesting point of order: Character had a few hidden surprises in his machinework. The arm is detachable from the stump and outfitted with some sort of swiss army steak knife forearm assembly. That, and his crotch is complete with flame spewing mini-phallus and dual igniter capsules.

#7

Well, that’s it for old crap in CG. Now it’s old crap in clay we’re looking at.

Fact:

Polymer clay dries out over time. If you don’t want your sculpture to brown out, burn, crack, or crumble, then never procrastinate in clay. Unless your polymer masterpiece is roughly the size of two fists or polymer clay beads for jewelry, or unless you just plain don’t care about your work, then you should NEVER use a home oven to harden a large polymer clay product. Ovens work up gradually to the temperature you set, and often spike out past the setting before they level off. This can cause your clay piece to crack or crumble, particularly if you’re working with uneven thickness, or thickness past a quarter inch. And if you’re like me, you find out ways to use that which are unanimously perceived as ‘mistakes’ to your advantage. Behold the hand of a fallen inner demon; a war trophy in the form of petrified remains. I purposely left this thing on a window sill for six months. I used the white clay (the clay that discolors the most when you cock it up), a home oven, and the thing is solid clay. It literally sat there going stale for so long, that the fingers were already crumbling when I threw it carelessly in the oven and turned the dial too high. I watched it burn. It had to look slain. It had to look defeated.

#8

Death and Finality:

Anybody who truly knows me, automatically knows of my interest in theatrics and props and prosthetic design. My Halloween costumes were always these elaborate, home-made creations: Zombies, ghosts, drag, the list goes on and on. Toward the end, I started designing my own latex prosthetics and even went as a full-head prosthetic and hand paint black man for Halloween one year. My own father didnt recognize me. This dried out grin is among my favorites in the home-made collection of ghoulish, monstrous, yet beautiful things. This piece cost me exactly $15.00 to make, and was made mostly from ordinary things that were already lying around the house. A $5.00 rubber skull in the decoration bin, a can of latex mold compound, some goat hair, a car washing sponge, my acrylic painting set, and some nail polish and talcum powder. One cant help but think about death and finality when a grinning rubber corpse head occupies the late night hours of painting and touch-up.

#9

‘The Collaboration Entity’.

You’re looking at Super Sculpey on foil. He was for fun and practice. Basically, he’s a life sized character concept I worked on whenever I got tired of my other projects. For the tiny stuff, I used a pack of red sewing needle threaders that resembled guitar picks with little wire loops on the end. I’d just sit there and idly strum out the details every night before I finally crashed out to Three Stooges. As a kid, I was totally fascinated with anatomy and how the body worked. Mom was an RN, so of course she had plenty of medical textbooks around to fuel the fire and keep me occupied. Pretty soon, my reading stretched over into animal study; and I started learning about as many animals as I could. The stranger the animal I found was, the better! So, for most of my life now, I’ve had a fairly good handle on body mechanics and morphology; and as an artist, it affords me the luxury of being able to ‘play around’ when it comes to designing biological body plans. That means I like to change the ‘rules’ dynamically in my head as I go along. I like to mix it up and come out with my own little recipes off the top of my head. As a result, even my fantasy characters retain a really powerful sense of plausibility. Always stick to what you know, if nothing else. Usually, and I say usually, it’s my goal as a character designer to sit there and ultimately try to make your brain say, “Hey! That could totally work!” whenever you look at my stuff. I’m always trying to find out what I can get away with. To me, doing that is almost always a good thing, and I say almost, because I really don’t like to do the same thing all the time either.

Getting back to ‘The Collaboration Entity’ here, I had a lot of fun just taking things I liked about the available life on this world and basically quilting it all together into what you see. I actually nicknamed him ‘Lobster Boy’ early on, and that’s because I threw in a lot of plant, fish, insect and crawfish anatomy to make his scalp. If you look at this guy’s head, it’s high school biology all over again. The whole time, I kept asking myself, “How much life can I drum into an inanimate polymer glob?” That’s important, because I wanted more of a ‘celebratory mish-mash of all known life’ thing going on. I didn’t aim to represent any one particular type of life form here either. This thing represents the sum total of millions of years of evolution…condensed. It’s us, and in a very real sense, we are it. So there you have it: ‘The Collaboration Entity’. By all means, gimme some feedback here. Believe me, it’s welcome! Penny for your thoughts and all that good stuff. Oh, and if you want to see more of this guy, all you have to do is click the links.

-James

#10

Experiments in macro photography on Collaboration Entity bust. Even though I’ve successfully baked sculptures a gazillion times, I always become nervous until the deed is behind me. Beforehand, I like to generate extensive photocoverage of an unbaked subject in case either something I didn’t account for or the absolute worst should happen. Again, more pictures like these are available on the link that came with the Collaboration Entity post. above.

#11

That which could be considered human about this character was inspired by the bone structure of a bushman. I chose people in the African region, because that is where human beings are believed to have originated from. The idea of a populous that can live quite contentedly in the most inhospitable of desert environments and without many of the things our global mainstream take for granted on a daily basis has always fascinated me to no end. Bushmen have such high cheekbones, and their broad faces look very boyish, even in the elderly. Small, dark eyes with cheery crows feet.

#12

Scales reminiscient of those found on land tortoise limbs, or possibly on a pangolin, line the neck and shoulders. Soft ear lobes, hanging on a rigid cartilage scaffold. Pennate projections, like that of a bird or some form of sea creature. The scalp appears to be assembled in pieces upon pieces and possibly breathes alternate forms of atmospheres? Biologically ambiguous, a monster of the id.

#13

I found that in covering this particular model, that I was generating what could be looked at as a mini-gallery of Biological Landscapes from a 7.1 megapixel camera on the super macro setting and no flash.

#14

When I build a particularly involved sculpture, I start beneath the skin. From my foundation form, I built out the bone structure, then I layered the muscles in, then the veins, and then the wrinkles of the skin. Working from the inside out gives most any work a genuine sense of depth that is irreproducable any other way. If the neck on this character did not look like a vital area after I finished it, or if the skin of his face did not look thoroughly soft and pokable and have tack to it, then I did not do my job here. That would mean I failed. I don’t stop until I’m comfortable enough to move on to the next step. In this case, the next step involves building another heat gun oven to cure this thing for good.

#15

Biologically inspired sculptures success is credited largely to feeling, and your own mood can directly affect how a sculpture turns out. It helps to have music, and for hyper detailed work, to have a powerful sense of focus and an ability to ‘step back’ from your work. You have to enjoy what you are doing. Good work in this medium is really just a pyramid of strong foundations. This level of detail simply wouldn’t hold if the foundation it was laid upon was weak.

#16

The Devil’s Ballpoint:

An average person can pick up the Round Stic variety of Bic Ballpoints in a 10-pack for about 78 cents at their local Wal-Mart. Ballpoint pens are potentially wonderful tools in a designer’s arsenal. I’m not entirely sure what it is about using them the way I do that seems to scare off many illustrators? Sure, an ink stroke is permanent, but every stroke on canvas is essentially a barometer for the character of the drawing; and in many respects, it’s creator too. You come to depend on an eraser too much, and you’ll start to doubt yourself needlessly at every step of the way, and that’s no way to live. After a while, you don’t even miss having an eraser. It’s a luxury item anyway, ha ha. I sat there and placed my heart and soul into this creature; sacrificed as much of myself as time and patience would humanly allow. Being in a hospital then, I had oodles of time and frankly, the pen gave out before my patience did. I think the point of this little mind-over-matter exercise was to prove to myself, at the time I started this, that there is a stark difference between experiencing a failure, and giving up. This drawing marked a new beginning for me.

#17

Building Turtles:

Concept Sketch from independently funded CG project. Day and night here, the lead’s kept burning, the ink rolling, the mice clicking and the clay flying. Whenever I can, I try to sit by myself in coffee shops and kind of let my brain uncoil in front of a pad for the day. Stuff like this spills out over idle cups of Earl Grey. I like the feeling of it; when the work area becomes a Ouija Board of the fingers, and some uncontrollable force places picture after picture in front of you. Consider this a postcard from my world. As I said before, when I’m designing a complex machine character with function in mind, I focus almost entirely on aesthetics first. This is an example of the aesthetics stage. Then, the form is filled as tightly with function as it need be , based on the demands of the project. The pleasing form I obtain governs how the function will be arranged within it, giving the practicality side a much more pleasing appearance in the long run. The next step from here are generating measurements and the fabrication of an aesthetic primitive to sculpt this guy out in 3d space. Later comes the process of drafting out clean, precise components, which I’ll show how you to do. It’s easy.

#18

Biologically Inspired Sculpture Discussion

Is there really a point to discuss, well hidden somewhere deep in this thread, or was it simply inaproppriately named ?

#19

Is there really a point to discuss, well hidden somewhere deep in this thread, or was it simply inaproppriately named ?

Um, that’s up to you. What have you got? Any particular techniques about this topic you want to talk about? What sort of things inspire you? If there’s a unique look to a piece, then what techniques were used to achieve it? Personally I custom create tools, which I’ll likely display if the discussion turns toward that, but that’s me. I also have a real liking for Scanned Electron Micrograph stills of animal surfaces. But again, that’s me. If your work leans more toward details and realism, then what sort of things do you study? If not? Then what area of this topic do you want to touch base on? If you read at all, then you’d know I wrote pretty extensively about this stuff already, but that’s just a start. My posts were simply examples. What about you? There’s a lot of unique ways people use to approach this kind of art, and the techniques and concepts behind biologically inspired sculpture apply to more than one medium. If you read, then I left a lot of points open for discussion. Not exactly hidden stuff here. There’s a lot of opportunities here to learn something new, if this area is a weakpoint for you. You can bet this is a broad topic, and with such a recently created thread, I tried early on not to stick to just one medium so discussion options could be left open. If you want to focus in a specific direction, be my guest. Please do, you would be a welcome first. What do you want to talk about? Anything you’d like to show or know? Let’s get it out there.

#20

I think your previous post should be in the place of the first one. Otherwise it really looks to me, like you just decided to publish some chapters from your autobiographical, or memoir book here, and there isnt much sense in discussing biographies…