[Excerpted From] I'm going to take some of this WED clay.
[Character Design Part 2 with Don Lanning] With no big deal I'm just going to pinch out
[Excerpted From Character Design Par 2 with Don Lanning]
kind of a horn shape, kind of a cone.
We're going to do a couple of these,
and we'll do a little bit
of variation on each one.
Here's a smaller one. That's interesting.
Let me go ahead and get some more clay here.
Good. Now I got a big portion,
so we'll do a big one.
And once again, I'm just tapering one end
a little bit and getting the other
end to remain fat.
I can go ahead and hit the bottoms of those,
make sure that the mass there
is in the base of these.
I like this one the most.
We'll put these to the side for right now.
This is a really simple, easy technique.
You won't believe how simple this is
and what a great effect you get.
I'm going to take just a piece of wood
that I had cut that I keep with me,
just a nice, little piece of wood.
I'm going to lay this down on its side.
I see that there's a little gap there.
I'm going to join that in
so it doesn't become an issue.
I'm going to lay this cone down,
and I'm going to use this
like a rolling pin, okay?
I'm just going to lay this here.
I'm going to apply pressure to this side
and very little pressure up here.
And I'm going to kind of control myself.
I can feel the piece bouncing
and its imperfection causing
the board to bounce,
and so I'm going to give it some
slight pressure and use this
as a rolling pin.
And every once in a while,
I'm going to look out and check it.
You can see it's become more
of a machined cone.
And there's still imperfections running
through it, so we're not done yet.
I'm going to lay it right back down
and continue with the same process,
once again taking the board,
putting all of the pressure here
towards the tip,
hold either end of the board,
and use it as a rolling pin.
I love using tools as a mechanical
assist to get an effect,
and this is one of those
great examples of that.
Now I've got what looks to be a
pretty perfect cone, and I like that.
I like that a lot.
Now, here comes the trick.
This is the fun part.
I'm going to put the board to the side.
I actually could make this
a little bit more tapered,
but I need a big horn here,
so I'm going to go ahead
and show it to you this way.
You lay it there.
You go ahead and take a ruler.
You could take a paint stick.
You could take your knife.
A straight edge or something with a real
solid straight edge works
the best, I've found.
But you want to put that there on the table,
and you want to do a little bit
of a trial run.
You want to allow the cone to roll.
And I'm putting emphasis and pressure here
along this edge, and I'm rolling.
And out.
And I begin again.
I don't ever plan where I lay the ruler.
You could.
I like keeping it a little bit more organic.
But once again, I'm keeping
in the same angle,
I'm joining in the same groove,
and I'm running along.
Now, you have to stay in the same grain
to achieve this effect.
So if you stop in a section,
you got to pick right back up
where you left off, and in the same grain,
if you will, you're going to travel.
If I had a longer ruler, actually,
this might work a little better,
but this is going good.
I'm going to jump to my paint stick
for a little bit more of a
good purchase on the tool,
and now I'm going to get free.
Now I'm in the groove,
so now I get to have fun
and roll that puppy out.
Look at that.
So with a mechanical assist,
with monkey using tools,
I'm able to create a beautiful--
Let me get some light on this for you.
Look at that.
That's like a unicorn horn
or a strange dreadlock,
or it's like a tentacle.
And these wonderful shapes that are
traveling through there, you know what?
It would be very difficult to sculpt
something like that,
so to use your tools to do that is wonderful.
And you can shape it
and give it all kinds of attitude.
And once again, that may be a
candidate for something that we can use
on our sculpture at hand.
I want to do a few more of these
so that we have some options.
And I'm going to make this one
thinner at the base.
That one got quite thick.
We'll go a little bit smaller this time
and see if it
gets a little bit more controllable.
Once again back to the piece of wood.
Same process is repeated.
I'm going to put pressure
down here and taper the thing.
I'm going to move a little quicker
this time and get that guy machined up.
If you were doing horns for a demon,
you know, you could combine several
of these together and--
I'm going to put a little bit of pressure
at the base here and get the overall thinner.
There we go. That's nice.
That's a nice shape.
You could combine two of these.
You could combine three of them,
blend them all into one,
and make like a bighorn sheep horn,
you know, and vault it
and give it all kinds of detail.
So once again, here we have a pretty
mechanically straight up and down
and cool-looking shape.
You may be tempted, by the way,
to take the edge of your board here
and do the roll.
Sometimes that's great results.
Sometimes it's too much.
I think we're going to try it
just because I mentioned it.
So instead of your ruler
or anything like this, we're going to make
a bit more of a profound statement on this.
I'm going to do a test roll,
see where I'm at.
Good.
Okay.
Test it, test it for its integrity.
Okay. I got a good take on it.
And I'm going to grab it.
Here it comes.
There it goes.
And bite.
Now, I chunked out the tip,
but who cares? I'm having good
line work here, so I'm not going
to stop myself.
There we go. I got it back.
Roll it, roll it, roll it.
As long as I stay in the same direction,
I'm gold. There you go.
And once again we have a beautiful--
I have become the first human unicorn.
We have a unicorn horn.
You could also take this same shape,
and if you were doing an octopi
or some kind of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,
you could lay the form on the table.
You could go ahead, go to either side
of the shape and push it down onto the table
as evenly as you can get it,
and you can force a pleat
to run down the length here.
So now you can see we have a
structure there that's very
much like a tentacle.
You could smooth this part down
as I'm doing there.
You could easily roll up a
little ball of clay,
larger balls here going smaller and smaller
progressively down,
but here I'll just put one
easily placed like that.
I can grab the end of a paintbrush
and go ahead and push an indentation
into the center of the ball,
and now I've created a sucker.
So there's a sucker there.
And once again, you'd have them
go progressively from large sucker
to small sucker as you go down,
and this, then, becomes an expressive
and wild tentacle of terror.
Anyways, so there you go.
So there's a quick recon mission
on how to make tentacles
or how to make horns.
I don't know if you guys can pan over
and see this, but just as a trial,
I'm going to hold this over to the sculpture.
And you can see that this would be
wonderful used for horns on a character.
I would probably, in fact,
cut this at an angle,
force a nice angle on that,
so that it would graduate out of the skin,
and here you can see that
that could easily become a horn treatment.
Man, that looks great just like that.
Look at that. Bingo. That's awesome.
Well, and once again,
if you find something like that
that you think might work,
you could then come back and put in
all kinds of cracking and weathering
and interest to the horn to sell as if
it's been alive on this being's
head for 50 years or 60 years and
has seen a lot.
You can break it, what have you.
So there's a really easy technique
to go ahead and get a really amazing horn,
tentacle, what have you, but a nice part,
a nice element to be able to load
into your sculpture.
[SUBSCRIBE at www.stanwinstonscool.com For Full Access to this course...]
[SUBSCRIBE at www.stanwinstonscool.com & over 450+ Hours of Education]