I don't have any advice on this, but I wanted to just chime in and say I like the piece. It reminds me of some of the tutorial work by Amelia Rowcroft. I haven't taken any of her courses, but they seem to be very good.

Hello all Here is ‘Jesse 233’, my second sculpture and my entry for the Proko Cheap Sculpture Challenge. Although I suspect I fell at the ‘cheap’ hurdle, as I bought 2lbs of Chavant Medium for £17.49 (or $24.30 equivalent). Other than that, I already had (from my first sculpture) some aluminum wire, flower wire, pliers, Milliput original, and a wooden block, for making the armature. For reference the set of six miniature pliers was £13.99. For tools, again, I already had a homemade rake (a pedicure baton with a 24-gauge nickel wound guitar string offcut attached), and I supplemented this with a crappy plastic handle, metal end dental tool (although I do have some dental tools bought specifically for sculpture, in the spirit of the challenge, this was just lying around at home.) All in then, the ‘from scratch cost’ is probably around $50. I made the armature using the simple mannikin frame drawings on page 40 of Loomis’ Figure Drawing book if you know it, which gave me an 11cm skeleton, slightly larger than the 75mm I sculpted at before. I made many, many errors (procedural and structural) in my first sculpture (you can see it on my Instagram @fairygrot). Since then I have learnt more about sculpture and I wanted to focus on two of these fundamental learnings, also referenced by Andrew so far on this course. 1. Getting the pelvis and rib cage right. 2. Focusing on contours (as opposed to internal information). Having the rotational pose photos was incredible. I really tried not to get sucked into internal anatomical detail I knew was there but couldn’t see on the contour. I only started adding some internal volume in the last couple of sculpting sessions. I also didn’t get bogged down in refining. I tried. But then I discovered that my tools just dragged the clay where I didn’t want it (very different to the polymer clay I used for my first sculpture). So early on I dropped the tools, and gave myself a goal of only using my fingers (the face of my pinky finger nail ended up making a much better shaping and smoothing tool than the dental tool). I therefore only used my home-made tool in the last session for trying out some raking across the chest, abdomen and thighs. Everything else is with fingers. This was done over five or six sessions, including one for making the armature, of between one and three hours. Ten to fifteen hours all in I think. My girlfriend ‘suggested’ I stop at this stage (i.e. she banned me from continuing), which I think is the right decision. I wanted to do something more gestural and loose and, despite this taking 5x longer than it probably should, I am happy with the outcome. Sorry for the waffle but, given the audience, I hope you found it interesting. Good luck with the challenge, all! Dan

Very nice! I haven't tried digital sculpting yet. Do you find that the skills you gain in digital transfer to traditional, and the reverse?

Well, I had a go at the challenge, it was fun. I think i might take this one further and push the details as I love the pose!

Funny my 20 years old wire stand I made but never get to finish, so using an old stand, foil and a 2 inches wooden shim from picture framing. Here is the head and upper body study.

Hi, was able to "finish" it on time, thank you very much Andrew! Crits are welcome :) kobi

Here’s my submission. I’ve never really done any kind of sculpture before, but I really enjoyed the process. Only tools I used were my fingers and some bent wire, which you can see in the pictures.

My entry for the cheap sculpture challenge: First time doing a sculpture with a block of air dry clay! It was pretty difficult! Used a spare brush, palette knife and paperclips, totalling less than 5$!

Here is a face that I based, especially in the early stages, on Jesse. I began with the profile, and I tried to really get Jesse's basic profile. After I had that, I tried to work without the photo reference as much, exploring the shape of the face and the features in ways that I thought was interesting. I probably would have learned more by being more faithful to the references the whole time, but I enjoyed working in something of a hybrid way. Is this a bad way to use reference materials, in this sort of hybrid way? I didn't used an armature for this--it is solid clay. I used a cheap clay that comes in multi-colored bars, which I kneaded together. The clay was a little over $2 a pound, but I used less than half of that. (I gave some thoughts on the clay in another post in this thread for a torso I did, so I won't repeat that here.) For tools, I used a paperclip, which I mangled a little bit so that I had loops of slightly different sizes and shapes. I also used a tooth pick. I broke it in half by accident, half way through sculpting, but then realized that the broken off end has its uses as well.