 Hi there, it's DJB and in this video I am very excited to announce within the year of 2020 I completed my very first original sculpture. That means that I have sculpted a horse from tinfoil and wire. This is a really big step in my equine artistry journey. It opens up a ton of doors. The first one is always the hardest and so I think there's this natural progression you take as a model horse customizer and an equine artist. You know you start with briars and you start painting briars and then eventually you get kind of bored of the molds available so you'll tweak them. Maybe changing the mane, maybe changing the ears, maybe changing one of the legs and you'll kind of subtly customize them into different forms. Then afterwards you might get a little braver and you'll start actually hacking the models up and making drastic customs and then maybe you'll completely sand down models and completely re-sculpt over top of them but nothing is as unique as sculpting from scratch and I mean tinfoil and wire. There's something in the brain that disconnects and makes it so much harder than briar customizing and that has always been my problem is drastic has been really fun for me but that making that step into original sculpture is really difficult because you no longer have any guidelines and so I have tried to attempt multiple original sculptures over the years. None of them have really gotten anywhere. I think there's this kind of stigma within the hobby that you know resin models and original sculpture work needs to be hyper realistic. I struggle with this immensely because I really like realistic work and I'm really impressed by realistic work but I know the reality of realism to that extent takes so many years of practice and even though I've been studying the horse since I was five years old I can't say that I understand the muscles and everything when it comes to creating a three-dimensional horse. Your first sculpture is not going to be a pier or an enemies or a storm watch. That takes so many years to get to that point so I had this mental block because if it wasn't perfect I couldn't justify it as an original sculpture. One night I kind of had a crappy day and I wanted to draw and I couldn't even like draw anything decent and there's certain days like that where you try to do art and it just is not working the way that you want it to work and so I was sketching, sketching, sketching and then I finally sketched this green horse and I didn't use reference part it just came out of my mind I just wanted flow and I sketched it in a green pencil crayon and I named that sketch Orin and Orin means the green one and I thought to myself why not make this original sculpture? Why not throw caution to the wind? Why not stop comparing myself to these great artists that have been practicing for 10 plus years and just sculpt a horse just just a horse it doesn't have to be realistic it doesn't have to be perfect it can have style it can have flair it can have motion that doesn't make sense just sculpt a horse it's gotta look like a horse that mindset of saying like it doesn't have to be realistic I don't have to sculpt like Kylie Parks I just have to sculpt a horse it like set my mind free and I was able to create my very first original sculpture Orin it's not just photographs so he's like classic size a little bit on the smaller side and he's very like shapely like he's very dynamic and dramatic and he doesn't really make a lot of sense anatomically this hind leg is very incorrect and his anatomy in general isn't like perfect but he's a horse and he has flow and he has style I really like how he's turned out and I like that he's stylized because I don't think there's a lot of art out there that is stylized in the hobby and I have a very stylized way of doing way of drawing way of sculpting way of painting the base is kind of makeshift and I don't love how the tail turned out I want to finish this before 2020 ends so I just finished it called it a day but I think I would go back and just make that tip of the tail a little more pointy so I'm going to share a little bit about the progress of how I created him because I think that's super interesting I posted this album of photos on Instagram but I would like to talk through them because there's some talking points that definitely goes along with it so he actually only took four months to complete from wireframe to finished sculpture on the last day of august was when I drew the sketch and that same night I made the wire armature and I find this step the most difficult I hate working with wire is really finicky it doesn't do what you want it to it doesn't stay where you want it to and I find it really frustrating overall that particular step is usually like the biggest feat if I can make an armature out of wire then usually I'm good so I added tin foil to the wire just to create kind of a better silhouette almost like the inner skeleton so kind of bulking out the chest bulking out the neck rib cage so that you kind of have more feel as to what the final piece will turn out with and you can check your proportions in that way once I had that I flushed out the whole thing in polymer clay so polymer clay is kind of a more plastic consistency it doesn't cure until you bake it so I had a couple days to kind of play with it and I just really roughly sketch it out essentially with clay fill it out so that I have form and I can put the little joints as little balls so that I know where the joints will eventually go it's easy because you can kind of put it down and come back the next day polymer is good because once you bake it you still can drill it you can sand it it's not as solid as epoxy it's more brittle but it works in this context and I really like using polymer in the initial phases because it gives me time so then once I'm happy with the initial form I baked the model and ironically he actually burnt really bad on one side and I really didn't have a base plan for him at all like a standing base I was just sculpting and I'm just hoping I'd figure it out later so through the process it was a little more difficult because he had to rest on his side to cure with epoxy and that wasn't always super ideal so I probably recommend creating a base you know with your original model but I started with my first layer of epoxy and that was kind of flushing out the face I like working on the face first because the face is the focal point it's the personality it's the heart it's the soul so I really like working on that so that I know kind of what the feel and the flow of the horse is going to be like so then once I had the head I was able to kind of flush out the rest of the body with another layer of epoxy and the feet I find the hardest one of the hardest parts so I kind of was making little like feet within this step though I realized that the amount of body mass was making the head look too short so there actually was a point where I had to cut the head in half in order to correct it and make it a little bit longer I like the phase where you have horse form because then it feels like drastic customizing so once I have like the basic bulk of the horse then I'm like okay I can shorten this leg I can lengthen the back I can do all these drastic customizing techniques once I have the horse form so that's the part that makes sense to me the initial horse form part is what I struggle with for sure and I find adding ears really accentuates you know what the personality of the horse is going to look like and I was able to sculpt feet and hoops then I added some hair and the hair just brings everything together and of course just slowly flushing everything out finding flaws but then I was able to stick into this base and the base was actually made out of plaster so plaster is a really crappy material it's what my boyfriend uses for a lot of his models and he'd given me this plaster base at one point but it was very uneven on the bottom and it had a lot of porous holes in it so I tried doing different things but I figured out that plaster actually like melts when you run rubbing alcohol over it so that was interesting and it's a very chalky brittle kind of consistency so using a resin or epoxy base is definitely obviously better and like I said it's kind of just a temporary thing to say that I finished the sculpture but if I ever do anything with him I will have to go back and revisit that and I just attached him with a little wire in his park foot and he was able to stand on that so I was pretty pleased and then obviously you know just added more hair more texture more details into the finished final piece all in all I'm really happy with how he turned out he's totally a djb piece in the sense that he's very stylized and very unique and very recognizable in my my way of sculpting and creating art at this time I am unsure if I will ever cast him or replicate him I've had a lot of interest a lot of people saying that they would like to see one I would love to have one just paint but I think I would have to modify a couple things to feel okay about casting him so I'm not sure I'm not sure he's the one I want to debut as a cast but just knowing that I have completed an original I hope you like him as much as I do thank you so much for supporting me through this journey it has been a lot of fun and I'm so proud of myself that I finally made that milestone and it's only up from here so thank you so much for watching this has been djb happy sculpting