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Description
Okay, so it's been several months since he's been finished. Amazing that it's taken me this long to find the time to talk about him. I'll try to make this brief as I would like to work on my next project (which is nearly done... the sculpting part at least).

Let's see...
Each of the limbs (arms, legs and probably head) took over 4 hours each to sculpt. One of the legs was almost done but I decided I didn't like it so I restarted. The arms and legs have small, wooden skewers inside of them for support. The tail was originally made just as solid Sculpey but I later decided to thread a wire through to make it stronger. That was definitely a good idea.

The wings were by far the most challenging part. I started with wire frames, cut and measured to be as symmetrical as possible. Then the Sculpey: Shaped as carefully as possible to also be symmetrical. Not too bad so far. The fabric... well... I was thinking at one point of using a tye-dye colour texture but my art teacher basically told me that with tye-dye, you can only really do circle patterns. That's a good thing that I was turned off of the idea because it was stupid to begin with. I cut out tons of wing patterns before finally settling on these ones. The reason mostly being that I couldn't figure out how to colour them. In the end, the best solution turned out to be the simplest solution. I won't explain all my other attempts but the idea that made it was simply to colour the fabric (which by the way was an old shirt of mine) yellow, rinse it out in the sink, and then use a sponge to lightly colour them red. That was that. I should mention that the fabric is merely glued onto the back of the wing frames. This means that they are not really meant to be viewed from behind.

The platform that he's on was also a nightmare. I don't know at which point it was but thankfully, I made the financially-wise decision to make it out of clay (supplied by my teacher) rather than Sculpey. For all of you who use Sculpey, you know how expensive it is. Using a ton of it for a base would be nothing more than a waste of money (unless you really needed to for some reason).

The base was actually supposed to be a rocky cliff or something but due to a number of unexpected size/posing problems, I had to create a makeshift base that based on the Metroid series, doesn't really make sense, but it was the only thing that would work. Ridley's hand needed to be leaning at such a sharp angle that a rock just wouldn't look right without being wider... but that would cover some of his body, which I didn't want. Instead, I went with the crystal thing. The texture was extremely easy. It's funny, I can't think of what the original object was but for some reason, I had to press some clay on it for the negative imprint, wait until the teacher fired it, press another piece of clay in That to make the positive imprint, wait for the teacher to fire That and then use that to stamp the base, giving it that almost-phazon-like appearance. Granted, I probably should have included more vine shapes but since I was using crystals, there wasn't much point in being to fussy with how accurate my representation of the material was. *Deep breath*... man, that was a mouth-full.

Another problem sprang up when I fired my first model of the base (which was with the stone design and therefore, took much less work). Clay looses all of it's moisture when it's fired so naturally, it shrinks. This, I knew... but I had no idea how much to expect it to shrink. Since Ridley's hands and feet all had to fit in specific places [nearly] perfectly, I was very disappointed when I discovered that I had no choice but to do another base because the one I did had shrunken way too much. The second base (and the one you're looking at) still didn't totally solve that problem. My dad's girlfriend, Jaci thankfully was generous enough to offer a shell from her collection (which I believe was from Mexico) to fill in a frustrating gap between his left foot and the ground beneath it. If you're wondering what that weird, dark blue part is, now you know.

One last thing: I am well aware that Ridley is supposed to be all skinny and such. I did him all muscled-out because number one: I found a bit of fan-art (found on my favorites page) that used this design and number two: because i knew if i did Ridley's real body, it would be way more fragile than I felt like dealing with. As for his head... well... it wasn't until a couple of weeks after his completion that I figured out what was wrong with him... his damn beak is too short... waaaay too short. A couple of days ago, I was thinking of giving him some "surgery" but I have enough sculpting plans to be bothered with that. All of my pieces have some flaws that I hate about them. I just have to accept them and use them to my advantage. They allow me to see my progression and that's important for days when I don't feel particularly motivated.

That's all though. I can't drag this any longer. Thanks for viewing!

Description
Okay, so it's been several months since he's been finished. Amazing that it's taken me this long to find the time to talk about him. I'll try to make this brief as I would like to work on my next project (which is nearly done... the sculpting part at least).

Let's see...
Each of the limbs (arms, legs and probably head) took over 4 hours each to sculpt. One of the legs was almost done but I decided I didn't like it so I restarted. The arms and legs have small, wooden skewers inside of them for support. The tail was originally made just as solid Sculpey but I later decided to thread a wire through to make it stronger. That was definitely a good idea.

The wings were by far the most challenging part. I started with wire frames, cut and measured to be as symmetrical as possible. Then the Sculpey: Shaped as carefully as possible to also be symmetrical. Not too bad so far. The fabric... well... I was thinking at one point of using a tye-dye colour texture but my art teacher basically told me that with tye-dye, you can only really do circle patterns. That's a good thing that I was turned off of the idea because it was stupid to begin with. I cut out tons of wing patterns before finally settling on these ones. The reason mostly being that I couldn't figure out how to colour them. In the end, the best solution turned out to be the simplest solution. I won't explain all my other attempts but the idea that made it was simply to colour the fabric (which by the way was an old shirt of mine) yellow, rinse it out in the sink, and then use a sponge to lightly colour them red. That was that. I should mention that the fabric is merely glued onto the back of the wing frames. This means that they are not really meant to be viewed from behind.

The platform that he's on was also a nightmare. I don't know at which point it was but thankfully, I made the financially-wise decision to make it out of clay (supplied by my teacher) rather than Sculpey. For all of you who use Sculpey, you know how expensive it is. Using a ton of it for a base would be nothing more than a waste of money (unless you really needed to for some reason).

The base was actually supposed to be a rocky cliff or something but due to a number of unexpected size/posing problems, I had to create a makeshift base that based on the Metroid series, doesn't really make sense, but it was the only thing that would work. Ridley's hand needed to be leaning at such a sharp angle that a rock just wouldn't look right without being wider... but that would cover some of his body, which I didn't want. Instead, I went with the crystal thing. The texture was extremely easy. It's funny, I can't think of what the original object was but for some reason, I had to press some clay on it for the negative imprint, wait until the teacher fired it, press another piece of clay in That to make the positive imprint, wait for the teacher to fire That and then use that to stamp the base, giving it that almost-phazon-like appearance. Granted, I probably should have included more vine shapes but since I was using crystals, there wasn't much point in being to fussy with how accurate my representation of the material was. *Deep breath*... man, that was a mouth-full.

Another problem sprang up when I fired my first model of the base (which was with the stone design and therefore, took much less work). Clay looses all of it's moisture when it's fired so naturally, it shrinks. This, I knew... but I had no idea how much to expect it to shrink. Since Ridley's hands and feet all had to fit in specific places [nearly] perfectly, I was very disappointed when I discovered that I had no choice but to do another base because the one I did had shrunken way too much. The second base (and the one you're looking at) still didn't totally solve that problem. My dad's girlfriend, Jaci thankfully was generous enough to offer a shell from her collection (which I believe was from Mexico) to fill in a frustrating gap between his left foot and the ground beneath it. If you're wondering what that weird, dark blue part is, now you know.

One last thing: I am well aware that Ridley is supposed to be all skinny and such. I did him all muscled-out because number one: I found a bit of fan-art (found on my favorites page) that used this design and number two: because i knew if i did Ridley's real body, it would be way more fragile than I felt like dealing with. As for his head... well... it wasn't until a couple of weeks after his completion that I figured out what was wrong with him... his damn beak is too short... waaaay too short. A couple of days ago, I was thinking of giving him some "surgery" but I have enough sculpting plans to be bothered with that. All of my pieces have some flaws that I hate about them. I just have to accept them and use them to my advantage. They allow me to see my progression and that's important for days when I don't feel particularly motivated.

That's all though. I can't drag this any longer. Thanks for viewing!