FANTASTICAL CREATURES - MAQUETTE WORKSHOP

In this session, we started creating maquettes of our chosen Fantastical Creature (as seen in this post). We would be making them out of wire, tinfoil and a material called Super Sculpey. Super Sculpey is an industry standard material, used by professional studios to create their character models.

We were given a block of wood with 6 holes in it, the holes intended to act as a holder for pegs which the model would be supported by; presumably from the legs / feet. We were then told what the proper order was for constructing the maquette:

1. Create the base of the character with wire
2. Flesh out the design with tin foil
3. Overlay with Super Sculpey

And that was pretty much it for what we were told, and the rest of the session was up to us!

I won't lie, I REALLY struggled making my Skollcrabb into a tangible maquette in this session. The bulk of the Skollcrabb is it's skull shell, which is essentially a half of a sphere. THAT was the biggest issue with modelling. Making the half-sphere wasn't something I accomplished this session, despite trying again from scratch.

I feel like I could've gotten there in this session had their been enough supplies to go around the entire class. Constantly there were moments where I'd turn around to get wire cutters or masking tape only to realise they were gone. Supplies were low, so people kept taking them from other groups. This meant some groups progressed faster than others because they kept taking the tools.

This meant me and my group progressed slower, since we didn't have immediate access to what we needed. This, in correlation, meant I had less chance to use a trial-and-error approach to get my maquette looking good.

At the end of the session, my maquette looked pretty... miserable.

(A discarded wireframe)

(Wireframe iteration 2 with tinfoil)

(Iteration 2 with some Super Sculpey)

I'm overall not very happy with how this session went. Not due to the actual session's content, but more so with my own work. I produced something that wasn't up to my own personal standard, and that's something I don't want to put up with. So I'm going to be taking time out of lessons to work on the maquette, maybe even starting from scratch again. I don't want to have a "that'll do" attitude about this, I want to make something I'm happy with and is an accurate representation of what I want my Skollcrabb to look like.