The Sculpt

As with all things... you gotta start somewhere. For this project there were a couple of sketches but I realized that the illustrations were more complex than what I needed. This design was going to need to be quite simple if I wanted any hope of success. So I turned to the massive pile of oil based sculpting clay I've had for years.

Since I knew this design would be symmetrical I could skip the detail on one side.

From here I had a decision to make. I needed to turn this into a paper pattern. Traditionally one just wraps the form in masking tape and then slice the tape on the potential seams. However I had a problem. I used clay because I didn't want to sculpt in plaster. Tape doesn't stick to clay. I could try wrapping the clay in a plastic bag and tape that but we were in a massive heat wave and the clay was less than firm.

My solution: shove the sculpt into the freezer and take a break. This proved to be mostly pointless. When I took the clay out it immediately started to condense moisture. Damn humidity! When I wrapped it in plastic the plastic immediately began to sweat. I called it quits for the night.

After rolling about in the sweltering heat for a few hours I realized sleep was not on the menu. Despite needing to be up early for work I crawled out of bed with a new plan. I'll take tracing paper and pin it to the clay form. Bit by bit I worked the paper around the clay and created my pattern.

I took the small pieces of tracing paper and taped them to a piece of pattern paper. With the pattern secured I was ready to get it on the computer.