I really wanted to bring more of my original character designs into the 3d realm for this project. I decided on the cartoon self portrait of myself that I put in various drawings or comics. She has angular and simple limbs which I thought would be a good way to start using clay again. I sketched out various poses before settling on the sitting pose inspired by a page from my zine from last semester, “If I Weren’t An Artist”.
I began with the legs and sculpted those into a pretzel type shape, then created the torso and noodle arms. I used a wooden skewer to attach the neck and head to the body to make it more stable. It was really challenging to smooth and shape the clay, and I improvised by using the backside of my fingernails and a piece of wire that I folded in half to create a loop tool. After the adding a lot of clay in various areas to the head to get the right shape, I added hair and facial details. The tiny eye shapes and eyebrows were especially tricky to place because they kept sticking to my fingernails and wire tool. Eventually I found the right placement and carved out the mouth as if she were mid sentence, to create the explanatory “well duh” expression. Adding the hair was really neat, because I played with length and shape when making the pieces to attach to the head and I felt like there was a lot of creative freedom in that part.
