Project Orbots Phase 1
These pictures show the process behind sculpting the prototype, which was the initial stage of my Mighty Orbots project. Keep in mind that I really don't have a set method or procedure in any of this and I'm not trying to teach anybody how it should be done, I just want to show how it is I do things. What I call phase 1 is the part of the process where I do a rough sculpt of all the body parts. This takes a lot of time and is a real pain because progress is slow and comes in bits and pieces. There are whole days where all I have to show for my work is a small part of an arm or leg.
I took a little over 100 screen captures from the first six episodes of the cartoon so I could get a good idea of what Mighty Orbots looks like from just about every angle. Those screen shots made up a good reference point from which I did my own drawings. One thing about the cartoon is that it uses a lot of forced perspective when Mighty Orbots is in action, consequently exaggerating some of the body parts' shapes and sizes. There wasn't a single scene where the robot was drawn with all of the body parts proportionate-the legs were always really long or the head was really small, or other features were emphasized for dramatic effect. I drew what I felt was a more proportionate rendering of the figure so that I knew how I was going to sculpt it. I did that on a couple of post it notes, and I tried to do the drawings at the same scale as the finished pieces.
These pictures show the initial sculpt I did for the face and chest. Everything is really rough here and the point was to just get through each body part with a reasonable resemblace and move on. I do it this way because I feel more motivated if I have visible progress everyday. If I were to dwell on the head and sculpt it over and over until I had it right, I'd be spending weeks on just one part. So I go for a quick and fast approach so that I can have as much done as possible as soon as possible. You can see how in the rough sculpt stage many of the body parts are simple geometric shapes. They get refined later.
I started on the chest first, then the head, then the lower torso. Once I was at that point I decided to work my way down and do the legs instead of the arms. That's mostly because I need to make sure the figure is balanced and stands up, and the best way to do that is to do the legs first. The lower legs started out as square blocks of sculpey. I drew some guide lines on the blocks in pencil that told me where I wanted to cut and where the various details would be. Then I cut them up and sculpted them to look like Bort and Crunch. I started with Bort, aka the right leg, first.
With the rough sculpts for Bort and Crunch done, it was time to do the arms. Boo and Bo started the same way as Bort and Crunch in that I drew pencil lines on blocks of Sculpey and then sculpted the arms from there. The arms were much more time consuming and diffficult to sculpt, even at the roughing out stage. They have a lot of details that are essential to the overall look of the Orbots combined form. I wanted to capture as much of those details as possible. I work with really simple tools and sculpting the arms of Mighty Orbots was a real challenge because of that.
When I did my initial mockups with the arm blocks placed next to the torso I found that they were too wide. I started with blocks the same size as the ones I used for the legs, and that wasn't going to work. So I had to do a lot of cutting to get them down to the size I wanted. With the initial arm sculpts done I was finished with phase 1 and the rough sculpting part. Now it was time to go on to phase 2, which is the refining of details and preparation for resin casting.