First, after several sketches I came to a decision on my sculptures’ concept. This is a dragon design based off of a seahorse called a Leafy Seadragon. This sketch is a way to find a starting point. It is important to remember that a sculpture can change and evolve depending on the sculptor's taste into something quite different from the starting sketch. Don't be afraid to push the boundaries.
Before I begin sculpting the dragon I want a strong believable environment. In this sculpture I am making a coral environment. Since I have decided to create a larger size sculpture and oil based Roma Plastilina modeling clay I want to create a foam base. This particular foam is insulating foam you can buy at any hardware store but it can be trick and quite sticky to work with so be careful. After my foam was fully dried I began to rough out shapes with a serrated edged knife for the coral environment. It is important to have a strong and accurate base for a great final piece.
Here is a turnaround of the final foam cut.
I covered the foam with a paper tape because the oil based clay will adhere much cleaner and better to the taped surface.
Here we can see the base layer of clay on the sculpture. Since this type of clay will never fully dry clay can easily be added and subtracted as needed.
Pictured above I numbered the steps I took to create the deep inner areas of these tube sponges.
Now the fun starts. While sculpting it is important to remember positive and negative space. Even though my sculpture is full of design it is becoming a believable piece of coral because of its well balanced positive and negative space.
Here is a close up of one of the finished tube corals. After creating the shapes I added additional texturing as a finishing touch.
