» Morezmore #22 Rusalka – Russian Water Fairy (Part 1)***

Morezmore #22
Rusalka – Russian Water Fairy (Part 1)
***

Posted By Natasha Red October on July 24, 2008

July 14, 2008

Good morning! It is time to pick up the clay again! While I am waiting for the Fool Muse, I decided to create Rusalka.

Rusalka

(plural rusalki) – are Russian water fairies. Sometimes “rusalka” is translated as “mermaid” but it is not quite the same thing. Russian rusalki don’t have a fish tail like mermaid, but two lovely legs and feet, just like humans.
They are spirits of unbaptized girls, unwed mothers and young women who committed suicide or were murdered near the water or were not given proper funeral rites.

They appear as young girls and young women – lovely, pale, lithe, with gorgeous bodies and flashing eyes. They have long green hair, worn loose. The hair is always moist. They have pleasing voices and musical laughs. They wear water lilies in the hair. They mostly appear in the nude or decorated with wet water weeds or wearing a long white cotton shirt – wet and clinging to the body.

They live in rivers, streams and brooks and surrounding woods. On clear warm summer nights, they come to the surface and frolic around in the water, splashing, laughing and playing joyously or sitting on the shore in the moonlight combing their beautiful long wet hair. Sometimes during those long summer nights rusalki run through the meadows and fields. Where they step, blue flowers grow and where they dance in the field, the grain grows better.

No man is able to resist the smiles of rusalki. But if he dares to come close to a rusalki gathering near the water and attempts to peep at those gorgeous bodies through the grass, he is in mortal danger as he risks to be discovered, pulled into the circle, undressed and tickled to death or drawned.

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So, to start with Rusalka: I happen to have around an already made Morezmore Modular Brickhouse Armature, so that part is done. For the detailed information what it is – please see here: Morezmore BrickHouse Armature

Posing:

Magic Sculpt to freeze the position, reinforce the entire skeleton and build up a bit of bulk in chest, hips, head and thighs. 20 minutes at 250 F in Deni oven (or 12 hours at room temperature) sets it to rock-hard state.

Two unfinished manzanita burls flats for the base. The base will be mossy, with tufts of grass, etc. The pieces of wood when put together, create this opening in the middle. I want to make an illusion of one of those small deep and dangerous pools – deep holes in the ground filled with dark water and weeds – which can be found in swampy areas in the woods. A while ago I promised to experiment with faux water and post the results – here is a great opportunity to do it.

Day 2 (July 15, 2008)

Good morning. It is 8 am and I am sculpting since 6. I am making the head and it usually takes forever. So far I made and folded down 5 heads. The main problem is the inset eyes – this is my second time – first was Fortuna, and yes, it was a nightmare with her as well. So I will keep going and put the pictures when I have something worth taking pictures of.

Rusalka is supposed to be very pale. Yet, I don’t want her to be stark white. So I decided on 1:1 mix of Puppen Fimo Rose and Porcelain – the shade is very pale pink.

The aids that I am using in making head are pictures from the book by Andrew Loomis – Drawing The Head & Hands. It is out of print, several sites, including mine, host online copies of these incredibly useful practical books by this wonderful artist. If the above link does not work for you, you can find and download a copy here:

http://www.morezmore.com/links.html

These are the pictures which are in front of me right now:

Anyway, recently I watched Jack Johnson’s DVD (the creator of prosculpt) on dollmaking. What he does with the head – he presets the eyes into the skull, makes sure they are aligned correctly, bakes to set them and then builds a face around it. So I decided to give it another try. I tried this method before, it was not successful – the position of the eyes was wrong to start with and my face did not work. However, I think it is possible, with practice, to set the eyes just right, and in that case, it would so so much easier to deal with the face.

Here is what I have right now – it is baking at the moment.

Day 3 (July 16, 2008)

Good morning! I have something to show! The face!

Not complete, need to clean the dirt and smoothen out and touch up the symmetry, but it is a face! As usual, I never know before hand what they will look like – so when this face showed up I decided that this will work for what I have in mind.

Rusalka appeared to be young and slightly naive and sweet. The mood is melancholic, pensive, deep in thought. That might change (the mood).

I sure hope that I can improve on this particular head without starting it all over. I don’t know how many heads I folded down – it is always such a struggle for me.

Oh, the experiment with prebaking the inset eyes did not work again – the eyes were too deep, so this head was done old-fashioned way – insetting the eyes into the raw clay.

anyway, here are the pictures! As I said, I will clean up the dirt, smooth it out and touch up on the symmetry tomorrow – I am out of time for today, but wanted to keep up with my decision to post every day.

Day 4 (July 17, 2008)

Well, by some amazing luck, I was able to complete the same very head as I started yesterday. It seems to me that all I did was clean up, touch up the symmetry and smoothen, but somehow she looks different now. How did that happen, I have no idea, but it is baked, moreover it is baked perfectly (!!!) no flaws, I generally rather like the face and it stays.

On the pictures you see the baked face and some added raw clay on the back of her scull and on the neck. Once I took the pictures I can see that I need to cut the of of the lids just a tad to make them symmetrical, but other than that I am going to proceed with torso.

Now, with the torso – I packed the clay around the skeleton – sort of making a tight fat suit. It will sit like that until tomorrow and that is a good thing – the clay inside will have time to cool off and solidify in the middle so that it has less chance to shift/move under my hands tomorrow and it is a bit easier to sculpt.

Day 5 (July 18, 2008)

Guess what – as I started to sculpt the torso, a suspicion started to creep into my head – there is something wrong with proportions. I measured the head – SURE ENOUGH! the head belongs to 10″ sculpt, not the 8″ sculpt as I have the armature for! Darn, I made the head too big. Well, I have two options now – make another head or make another armature. I opted for another armature – so, here we go – 2 steps forward, one step back. Will make another armature and post the pics.

Another afterthought – I forgot about reference pictures! What usually happens – I start a sculpt, think of a pose, pose my sculpt, start to put the clay, get into an anatomy roadblock and start to look for anatomy reference pictures that will be in the same pose as my sculpt. Of course, it is usually very hard to find. Wouldn’t it be much easier, I thought, to FIND the reference photos FIRST and THEN make the pose? Yes, it would.

So, with this bright idea and the fact that I need to redo the armature anyway, this morning I went on the search for reference photos on Female Anatomy for the Artist website. I found a nice set. Here are the pose and anatomy reference photos for Rusalka. I have them in large resolution in front of me, but for copyright and modesty reasons I am putting just small thumbnails here:

Day 6 (July 19, 2008)

Good morning! As you might recall from yesterday, I needed to make another larger armature. So I did. The head is 1.25″ tall, the entire height is 1.25 x 8 =10″. Printed Ms. Bones in 10″ scale, wire, pliers – that drill is easy enough for me by now.

A eureka moment – once I put the magic sculpt on the armature and tried to smoothen it out, I discovered that wetting the entire armature in the sink and just rubbing with wet hands all over the surfaces speeds up the process of smoothing quite a bit.

Another eureka moment – she was not sitting quite right and I realized that she needed those bones on the very bottom – you know those bones that hurt if you sit too long. Once I added those two bumps, her pose immediately adjusted and became so much more natural looking.

I played with the head angle and incline a little bit (it rotates 360 degrees at the moment) – not sure what will be the best one. But that can wait perfectly well until later, of course. The point is I really like this feature about modules – the ability to keep the options open until the very end for the final subtle turns and angles of head and limbs. Once all the body parts are sculpted, it is very nice to be able to play with them and pinpoint the positioning just so – perfect for what you have in mind.

Here are the pics – they came out – rather unintentionally – with a ghostly bluish glow.

Overall, she looks good to me – I can move forward with the torso tomorrow.

Day 8 (July 21, 2008)

Good morning!

I have something to show – the base. So the idea is to make a base out of two manzanita burls with an illusion of a a deep mossy swampy overgrown water hole in the middle. I put it together – so far so good and very easy, no water yet.

step-by-step:

- put the burls on cardboard (priority box)

- trace the outline with a pen

- cut out the outline – this is the bottom for the base

- mix magic smooth

- spread magic smooth on the cardboard – thin layer – full coverage

- spread magic smooth on the bottom of the burls – full coverage

- press burls on the cardboard

- plug and fill the gaps with small pieces of wood and magic smooth in the “water hole” – to make it leak proof

- create a bit of a landscape with small wood cuttings on the top – the ugly magic smooth spots will be later covered with artificial moss.

Here are the pics:

Day 9 (July 22, 2008)

I am doing the inventory – updating all counts. This must be done as quickly as possible, because everything is off the shelves and it is impossible to ship until the inventory count is completed. So everything is on hold until I am done with the inventory and put everything back to the shelves and resume normal operations.

Thank you for watching and sorry for the hold up

Day 10 (July 23, 2008)

Good morning! I am continuing with the base. It looks like I got carried away with all that landscaping on the top of the base – Rusalka did not have a place to sit on. I figured that out, of course, after it is all hardened. So with the help of the icepick, by brutal force, I removed some of the wood cuttings to make the surface more flat.

Next step – the moss. That is an easy fun part – pour fabritac on the surface – a couple of square inches, take bits of faux moss and press it down using the fingers and toothpick, trying to create as little glue strings as possible. I used three colors of moss – Forest, River Bank and Meadow, because I like the varigated look. I also used this chance to try faux grass in Medium Green. It was my first time and I like the results – it does look like little tufts of glass and a little goes a long way.

Next step – water. The pit on my base is lined up with moss and I figured I just pour the faux water into that hole and that should look just right. I grabbed one of those 2 oz samples of Liquid Illusion Faux Water, emptied both bottles into a paper cup, stirred it well and poured it into the hole – filling it completely up. Immediately I noticed that the level is going down – I have a leak! I had thought that I sealed it rather well. Apparently, it is going down into that space between the burls and the cardboard bottom. The bottom is dry as of now, but the level of the liquid definitely went down quite a bit. Oh well, I figured, let it be. I sat it on waxed paper and left it alone. If waxed paper gets stuck to the bottom, no big deal. I am going to let it harden over the period of 24 hours and pour another 2 oz portion on top of the surface tomorrow. I think that should be just fine. Meanwhile, the moss through the water does look really nice – you can’t see on these pictures, I will take a better shot next time! Here are the pictures:

I need to start my working day, talk to you soon! Many thanks for watching!

To be continued – Part 2 can be found here:

http://morezmore.com/myblog/2008/07/24/rusalka-2/

This post first appeared on Ebay Blogs. As Ebay is not supporting blogs anymore, I am moving all archives here, including all the comments – Thank you!

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