Tuesday, September 10, 2013

How to Sculp Chainmail with putty or Green Stuff


I know there are a lot of tutorials of how to do it but it isn't as simple as it seems. In this tutorial I show a modification of the normal tutorial that I came up with recently. The tutorial shows directly the first time I have tried to do a chainmail this way, I just came up with and idea and started to do it without really knowing what I would obtain.


Materials:
- Green stuff
- A+B white modelling putty
-Water

Tools:
- Sculpting tool
- Hobby knife
- Bretonnian Lance (or other pointy thing)
- Fingers (even if they doesn't appear in the picture below)

In the picture above there are also a pin and some sprue because I also though of explaining how I did the legs of the miniature before I changed my mind.

Step 1: Kneading the putty
  • We start by kneading some putty, as I've said some other times I usually mix Green Stuff with A+B modelling putty. As you knead the parts together the colors will blend together until you obtain a greenish color.

Step 2: Preparing the surface where the chainmail will go
  • It is not possible to sculpt a chainmail in the air, you need to have some place on top of which you could sculpt it. In this case I choose to do a thick surface as I pretend to make chainmail in the front and in the back of the miniature but is also possible to sculpt chainmail on top of a slimmer surface.
  • Now we place a "sheet" of putty of an homogeneous thick on top of the solid surface. We cut the extra putty around the edges with a hobby knife and adapt the putty to the base surface with a sculpting tool.
Step 3: Sculpting the chainmail
  • Firstly, I mark some straight lines with the hobby knife (a) that I'll use as a guide when I making the "rings" of the chainmail.
  • With the flat side of the sculpting tool y press a little bit the lines marked in (a) so they are deeper and more round (b).
  • Now we pick up our pointy object and start pressing it to make the rings. We start going from one side to another (c.1), and then form the other side to the first one (c.2), in example from right to left and from left to right. We continue like that until there are no rows without rings (c.3). If you want each time you "poke" the putty you can push it to one side so the rings aren't round and the global shape looks better
  • To finish up, we press again with the flat part of the sculpting tool the lines and we touch up the worst rings (d).

Result

The picture isn't great and I have seen better results  but at least is orderly. I think is one of the best results I've get and I have made quite a few chainmails. You can see the chainmail that I made before this one in the picture below and compare the results, the difference between the two is simply to have marked the rows from the beginning.



I hope this tutorial could be useful to someone!

2 comments:

  1. Very nice, and useful indeed! But now you have me curious about how you did the legs. Any chance for another tutorial?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Probably not, or not about those legs as the miniature was left unfinished. If you're interested I could make an entry with the step by step photos and a few sentences, but nothing to elaborated because that takes me a lot of time and I already have some trouble updating the blog "regularly"

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