Venom

This was my third sculpture, and luckily it was a great success. I love it, and it was a great motivator for continuing this journey.

I didn't intend for it to be Venom at the beginning. It was just supposed to be some generic humanoid monster, and Venom was one of the references I was looking at. I really liked the idea of the cheeks not being fully connected, with muscle strings (biological strands) attaching the upper jaw to the lower jaw instead, combined with a wide-open mouth full of shark teeth. I tried sculpting it, and it worked and felt great immediately.

The head turned out so well and expressive that I thought it needed something bigger than a figure, so I decided to make a complete diorama. To figure out the posture, I stood in front of a mirror and tried to find the right movement and weight distribution (it is always a funny experience to catch yourself making these weird, dramatic postures from the side).

Once I had the idea locked in, I got to work on the body. I didn't have much experience with clay yet, so I took the easy way out and used a ball stylus to rough-smooth the surface basically everywhere. It wasn't a deliberate artistic choice, I just needed a simple way to connect the clay volumes, but it ended up working perfectly. That lucky accident gave the piece great texture, and it taught me a very important lesson: texture makes the paint job much, much easier.

Easy techniques like dry brushing (dragging paint only across the top, raised surfaces) give great results without requiring advanced painting skills, which is good, as my own technique is still lacking, though it has improved significantly since. I realized that building texture directly into the clay reduces the work needed later, because the physical texture catches the paint so easily.