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How to Sculpt Fantasy Miniatures: Part 2, Sketching and Drawing out your miniature

Working with clay in three dimensions is a skill that takes practice and the only way you are going to get good at it is to practice it! But sketching things out will help you get much better, much faster.

So get your sketch pad and start drawing! If you don't have a sketch pad Amazon.com has plenty of them. Order one and until you get it just use any notebook paper you can find. Strathmore Drawing Paper Pads Size 11 x 14

We are beginning this miniature tutorial with some easy stuff and I am going to give you an easy template for making your first miniature drawing. This drawing is for a six inch miniature and it shows you a valuable rule of thumb.

A human being is approximately eight heads in height. That means you can draw a box and divide it into eight sections. This will help you get the proportions right.

Draw yourself a box just like the one shown here on the left. It is six inches high and 2 1/2 inches wide. Now draw a line right down the middle. This is the center line of your miniature. Now draw all your little boxes. Each box is 3/4 of an inch in height. This gives you your eight sections and the top section is the size of a human head.

Now start drawing in the human body by just using circles and oblong shapes. The head is one unit, the chest takes up two units, the pelvis is one unit, the thighs are two units, knees and calves one unit and the ankles/feet one unit. This is just a rough sketch to get the scale right. In the next step we will round it out a bit and make it look more human.

Now look over your drawing and flesh it out. Connect the oblongs and the circles so they are smooth. Try to capture the physique and musculature of a warrior. I have added a sword on his back.

When you have completed this stage you have done enough drawing to move on to doing some sculpting. Remember that the drawing you have is six inches in height and the first miniature you make is also six inches in height. This is so you can get a feel for modeling and sculpting.

If you want more practice drawing fantasy figures I have a totally free fantasy art school that has lessons and recommended books for you. It's a nice way to improve by working your way through the lessons.

This first section is just to give you a basic idea of a figure. Once you get good at basic figures you should experiment with lots of different poses. These different and dramatic poses will make a big difference in the attractiveness of your miniature. I will talk more about this in lessons coming up.

Continue with Sculpting fantasy miniatures tutorial Part 3

PAINTING MINIATURES:

Tips and techniques for painting miniature subjects,- This tutorial for miniature painting starts here

Tutorial: How to Cast Miniatures - This is a nice tutorial on how to duplicate miniatures. In the first tutorial I show you exactly how to make a copy of a small and not too complex original like this treasure chest. Casting Miniatures is a lot of fun and not hard at all. How to Cast Miniatures I cast two different treasure chests.