Making the Monk - Part 1

I recently saw this competition on Deviant Art, and I thought to myself, 'I can totally do a miniature for that' (it helps I've been wanting to do a female monk style miniature for a while). I also thought it would be cool to document the process in aseries of blog posts; to give people some insight into how I work. It should be noted that each 'step' represents a single sculpting session, I like to let the putty set before moving on to the next part of the model. This will also only be a broad overview, it's not a tutorial, just a tracking of the process I'm going through, tutorials and similar discussions will come in the future. Anyway; on with the show:

The First Step in creating a miniature is reference art. Usually I draw on the expertise of a concept artist, but in the case of the D3 Monk, there is plenty of official art, and fan art online. A quick search yielded some choice references:

The Second Step (sort of, I kinda did steps 3 & 4 first, but this stage is flexible) is basic plasticine mock-up. This is not meant to 'look good' it's mainly to help me solidify my ideas and finalise the pose.

The Third Step: Armature!, or at least the legs armatures. The armature forms a rigid (mostly) wire skeleton for the rest of the model to be sculpted around. I often favour doing the legs separately, then wiring them together, to allow me better access to shaping the legs.

The Fourth Step: Proper sculpting time: the legs. I like to sculpt a whole leg in a single go; that lets me really work on getting the proportions right. I also usually do one leg first and try to match the proportions of the second to the first. You'll also note I have the excess wire bent back and stabbed into the cork to give it extra stability.

The Fifth Step involved tying the two separate wires together to form the spine of the armature, then building the basic torso form on to that.

The Sixth Step was to flesh out the form of the torso slightly, to give me stuff to work the clothes around when I get to that stage.

The Seventh Step was to give the monk some pants, or at least pant legs, by layering a thin coat of putty (1/1 green stuff & pro-create) over the legs then shaping it to suit. It is at this stage I noticed I'd got the length of the shins out of wack, so I cut the putty of the shorter one, and slid it down the wire.

That's all for the moment, it's a pretty big post anyway, I'll have more updates soon.