Building on the Armature

 Having decided to use a wire armature this time, I set about making a friend for Scrumpy, a pony about the same size as him, roughly 1:9 scale. I based the sculpture on a picture of an Exmoor Pony, and I have named her Bramble.
 I thought you might like to see some pictures of how I started to build on the bare bones of the armature.

Looking back, I should have used tinfoil to bulk out the sculpture, as I have used a lot of clay on this model, and she is quite heavy.

If  I had used tinfoil to get the main part of the body to this stage I would have saved a lot of clay.

The dog was built up with tinfoil, and was an easier and quicker build.

You can see the wet (grey) patches of clay, these guys are drying out for the day.

Once the model gets to this stage, *proper* sculpting can begin, I can't really help anyone with that, other than to say that you need lots of reference material and you need to keep referring to it!

 I find that I go through several stages of sculpting :-

The start - I'm enthusiastic and excited.
The middle (1) - something will look a little off, and I'll start to hate the sculpture because I can't figure out what's wrong.
The middle (2) - I finally see what's wrong, resculpt and I'm happy again.
This middle phase goes on for a while, as I often get it happening multiple times on the same model!
The end - somehow, everything comes together, and I add a few little details to finish up.

If things look like they're going wrong, don't despair, take a day or two off and then come back and look at your project with fresh eyes. Remember, you can change any part of your model at any time.

Happy Sculpting!