Creating Truffle - Part One

I thought it might be interesting to do a series on Truffle's long journey from being bits of bent wire to a finished resin. This isn't meant to be a tutorial, just a series to give anyone that may be curious an idea of how I did things.

Truffle isn't my first sculpture, but he is the one that I actually stuck with and finished. This series will also probably give you some idea of how horribly slow I am to finish anything. Hopefully I'll be able to post the second part of this series soon; I just need to dig through my external hard drives and find where I put my 2015-2016 in-progress pictures.



August 26, 2014: Truffle begins as a wire armature with a little epoxy to hold things together. It's much easier for me to make sure the legs are the right length if I make the armature in a standing position.



Here's the armature after it's been bent into a trotting pose.



Adding more epoxy to start building up the barrel.

Starting to build up the shoulders, hindquarters, and legs.

Starting on the head and neck, the parts that ended up giving me the most grief.

Continuing to build things up. Poor Truffle has a creepy skull face at this point.

Starting to get a bit too fat. Especially that neck.

Getting ready to add eyes.

Eyeballs glued into place. They're just little balls of hardened epoxy painted because I thought that might make it easier to see what I was doing. The can of H-E-B root beer in the background makes me miss Texas.

Starting to get an actual face, but managed to lose his tail wire.

I wasn't happy with the headset, so I cut it off. Working near my computer like this probably contributed to its early demise.

After reattaching the head and putting in a new tail wire.

I wasn't happy with the head, so I filed it down.

He has a face again!

I'd originally wanted to avoid having a base, because they just make things more complicated, but I just couldn't get the look I wanted, so yeah, more chopping the sculpture up. 

I tried a few different things. I thought about just having the front feet off the ground...

...but I didn't really like that either, so I decided to just have the near hind hoof planted on the ground, which was like my main reference photos for the pose. 

I added a small neodymium magnet to his planted hoof. I like this a lot better than a peg, but I haven't been able to find any more of the right size. I also redid his face again, and this time used some small, round metal beads for the eyes. He's also managed to lose his tail wire again.

Last picture for this post. This was how he looked on December 15, 2014. If you look carefully you can see where I cut through the barrel to lengthen his back.  Still a long way to go, but at least he looks like a horse...