Autumnal or Green?
My first attempt in mold making and casting (the shrunken head) gave me about a million ideas for more designs and this week I figured it was about time to follow one! In honor of the season I decided to make an autumnal “green man” inspired figure, and then thought - why not make two in different coloring? That’s one of my favorite things about casting, it’s essentially like coloring a stamped or printed image and you can really see how different color schemes give the same image a different feel.
I made a video of the coloring, you can find it here:
don’t let the length of the video fool you, it took hours of adding layer after layer to get the shading, but I do find the process very calming :)
My inspiration for this figure were so-called “green-man” images that you can find in churches and other structures surviving from the middle ages, mostly - but not only - in Britain and Ireland. Basically, green-man are faces with foliage sprouting from them, sometimes enveloping them and sometimes coming out of their mouths. Though it is popularly believed that these figures are remnants of an old religion, hidden in plain sight within church decorations, it seems that there’s no clear evidence to that, and they may have simply been a decorative motive, like gargoyles and other wall carvings. Either way, I’ve always found them beautiful and decided to try and make one.
I sculpted the figure in polymer clay. It’s a much more detailed piece than the shrunken head, with each of the leaves individually cut and textured. I decided to make it more gender neutral than the usually bearded green-man, so the features are rather feminine. When it was ready and baked I made a silicon mold of it. Then I used the mold to make a few resin casts. I really love putting the mold and cast next to each other to see how the details look in them :)
I used the same techniques in coloring the autumnal and the green figure, starting with the face that was textured to look like wood. In the autumnal face I used a dark brown in the base, letting it get into all the lines for depth. In the green face I only dry-brushed the dark brown, so it didn’t go into the lines and they remained in the light base color. I think this gives the feel of a younger tree that I liked with the fresh green coloring.
The main part of the coloring were the leaves, there’s just so many of them! My general rule in shading is wet-brush for shadows, dry-brush for highlights. It works in most cases, and I find it easier to remember like this. You can see in the video that I change back and forth between adding shade and light. In general it makes sense to start with the shadows and finish with the highlights, but somehow it always takes me several “rounds”…
You can find a short list of the materials I used bellow the detail shots. These figures will be mounted before the make their appearance in my shop, but here I just wanted to focus on the coloring, I hope you found this interesting!
Which color scheme do you like better? Are you an autumn or green lover, or maybe a little of both? ;)
xx
Naama
Product shortlist:
Painting: acrylic paints, I used a combination of distress and Anita’s paints. Distress: ground espresso, black soot, pumice stone, antique linen, lucky clover, peeled paint, twisted citron, crackling campfire, aged mahogany, wild honey, carved pumpkin, picket fence, candid apple. Anita’s: golden yellow, hunter green.
For sculpting the figure: polymer clay (I used Fimo, but any would do), a variety of stylus and silicon sculpting tools and a craft knife
For the silicon mold: Smooth-on OOMOO 30
Resin for casting: Smooth-Cast 300