Torso

Here's the store display torso I bought recently, before and after 2 cans of white primer and several coats of Krylon matte finish spray. It was too translucent before (a problem I encountered previously when working with super sculpey in original pink color). That makes it impossible to really see the surface - note how pale and diffused the shadows are on the left compared to how solid and visible they are on the right. Unfortunately the formerly invisible vertical striping also became quite visible - it seems to actually be textures on the surface of the plastic, so there's no getting rid of it short of stripping off all the primer and sanding it down and polishing it - screw that!! I can live with it.

This is going to help immensely with where the edge of the big torso shadow goes, and with the way the parts of the body fit together into one smooth sinuous form rather than braking apart into separate boxlike parts the way I used to draw it.

It's a very strange experience to have all these life-cast bits and pieces from real people sitting on my shelves in the studio now - very Frankenstinian. But these mannequin parts are today's version of the classical plaster casts used to teach art students since antiquity.

Which brings up something I've been wanting to post about come to think of it - elsewhere on this blog - back when I was an unseasoned noob (lol) I wrote rather disparaging remarks about the practices of cast drawing and direct drawing studio techniques. I think I had picked up these attitudes from comments Frazetta had made somewhere, the showoff-y bastard! Yeah, maybe he didn't need the atelier approach, but not all of us have his photographic memory or insane talents! Luckily I've come to realize the importance of both of those time-honored methods.