KidNews warmed up for last June’s NBA Finals by featuring the sensational artwork of Jack Graham. His clay sculptures of Bulls MJ, Scottie Pippen and Dennis Rodman caught readers’ attention. And plenty of you asked, how did he do that? Now, after all that anticipation, and much to our elation, we have an explanation. Follow Graham’s steps for making a Viking figure. He made our figures in the same way. (These steps are excerpts of a story that ran in the May/June 1997 issue of Step-By-Step Graphics magazine. Information in parentheses are details we added after chatting with Graham; many of them could help you if you want to dabble in similar projects.)
– 1. In pencil sketches, Graham roughed out the composition for the sculpture, then began working out details. (Graham sells his clients photos of his sculptures, not the sculptures themselves. Because of the materials used, the sculptures eventually fall apart. Graham keeps the sculptures and sometimes while working in his studio, he’ll hear hands and heads from old sculptures clunk to the ground.)
– 2. Then Graham began sculpting the Viking figure in modeling clay, starting with the head. “All of my characters’ heads start out with an egg shape,” he says. “Then I’ll lop on the nose and begin, basically, just sort of thumbnailing it out in clay.” A simple wire armature with a ball of oven-hardened Sculpey provided a base for the Van Aiken oil-based modeling clay he used for the head. (A wire armature is a frame for supporting clay because the clay can’t hold itself in place imagine a skeleton. You can get sculpture wire at art-supply stores. Also, Van Aiken clay is the expensive, flesh-colored kind Graham uses. You can try basic colored clay. That way, you won’t need an air-brush to color it, as Graham does.)
– 3. Sculpey was also used to form the eyeballs. “Trying to keep the eyes nice and round and still pushing the clay around to build eyebrows, cheekbones and noses it’s virtually impossible to do that with soft clay,” Graham notes. “So in advance, when I make the armature, I’ll make the two eyes.”
– 4. Graham penciled irises onto the Sculpey eyeballs. “That’s so I can make sure that I’m sculpting the head from the angle that the eyes are looking,” he says. “I want to give the main emphasis to the three-quarter view the camera’s going to see.” He uses few tools other than his fingers to build his sculptures, but for detail work, he often turns to a simple wooden tool, carved to a point at one end with a wire loop at the other. (This tool shows in the picture at bottom left; you’ll find sculpting tools at art stores.)
– 5.When Graham was satisfied with the shape of the head and the roughed-in facial features, he added a simple wire armature to support long braids and built a Viking helmet out of Sculpey. Most of the pieces in the sculpture were modeled in soft clay, but Graham used Sculpey when he needed sturdy forms to support his armatures or when he wanted to create tiny elements with fine detail.
– 6. To smooth the surface, Graham brushed mineral oil over the clay. (Mineral oil is simply a laxative found at drugstores.) “The mineral oil makes the (oil-base) clay very pliable, just this side of a liquid,” the artist explains.
– 7. When he built armatures for the hands, Graham included a wire for each finger. “I like to get them going in all directions,” he says. “I want each finger to have its own gesture. That’s what makes a sculpture lively and expressive.”
– 8. Sculpey was roughly molded around a wire to build an armature for the body. “The body armature is the biggest thing I make out of Sculpey,” Graham says. “If it’s too big, the outside cooks first and it cracks apart.”
– 9. To keep from accidentally deforming an element he had already finished when he worked on another part of the body, Graham sculpted the figure in pieces. But as the sculpture progressed, he often assembled the parts to make sure they worked together well, and then disassembled them to continue refining the forms.
(The rest of the ‘zine story describes painting details you probably won’t use. Graham paints with an airbrush, and a cheap one will run $180, so you probably will want to skip that. Also, you won’t have much luck trying to handpaint clay; even with the force of an airbrush, Graham must use layer after layer of paint to get it to stick. So working with clay that’s already colored is a good way to start.)
