Armature Tutorial

Things you will need:-
Wire
Masking tape.

When sculpting animals it's best to start with a wire armature, especially if those animals are going to be standing. Any thin bits that stick out, for example legs, arms and tails need to be a fairly hefty gauge wire.
you can get away with thinner wire in places that have a thicker layer of clay.

When I make horse armatures I start with a picture of a horse skeleton, that way I know I have an accurate foundation to start sculpting from, and it takes out a lot of the guesswork. So the first thing to do is to print out a picture of the skeleton of your animal at the size you want to sculpt it.

Now to make the armature....Starting at the hip, follow the shape of the ribcage with your wire as closely as you can, going back to the hip and then turning the end of the wire back towards the head before you cut it. Now use your masking tape to tie together those loose ends (and save your fingers from pointy bits of wire!)

 Next make a small loop inside the head and follow the shape of the spine, until you reach the end of the shoulder blade. Now tape it to your ribcage as shown below.

 Next we will add the legs, making sure that you have enough wire to make both front legs, fold your wire in half, and starting from well behind the shoulders follow the bones of the leg, making sure to bend both pieces of wire at once. You can either cut the wire to length, or leave it long if you want to mount your model on a stand. tape it to your armature as shown below and repeat the process for the back legs.

The tail is simply wrapped around the armature as shown below. I use a piece of wire bent double and I twist it all the way down the tail.

Next I wrap all the exposed bits of wire with masking tape, so that the clay has something to grip to.
By now you should have something that looks like this......

The best thing about these armatures is that you can play around with the poses until you get exactly what you want, these little guys have a lot of life and character to them, unlike the cardboard cut out I used previously!

I hope this tutorial will help somebody, I'm not a particularly brilliant artist, but I'm getting good results with this method.