The World According to Tom

One of the things I find so interesting about sculpting is the enormous complexity of the fundamental question of representative art; what makes a thing look like itself?

It’s something we are taught by experience but also something we are predisposed to learn. A small child or a fan of modern art doesn’t require much more than a bit of twisted wire or a glob of clay to see a horse or a bird in flight but while impressionism is apparently doing well, deconstruction and abstraction have yet to make much headway in miniature figures,

Perception is a mix of experience, formulation and intuition/instinct. There is what we have seen before, what we expect to see, the frequently unconscious conventions we have learned of how to see it and the way our brain is wired to see. This is a huge subject and I expect I could write a book about it with a bit of research so I’ll keep it from ballooning out of control by confining it to the example of a figure I recently finished.

This difficulty of depiction occurs most commonly in things which can not easily be sculpted as they actually are, at least not with the materials we use, hair and fur for example or the clear parts of the eye. There is also the subtlety of the problem of complex surfaces, an example of this would be differentiating fabrics such as silk from denim, leather from wool.

The question I’m going to explore is a bit more unusual; how to give visual clues so as to distinguish between a figure of a a person who is very large and one which is simply out of scale.

Just as in a television or cinema picture, when human figures are rendered in sculpture at something other than life size the clue of relation to the viewers size is lost and some other visual clues to establish scale are sought by the mind. In a film this is generally the background this is demonstrated best by it’s manipulation in commonplace film special effects, if you put a normal sized man in a 1/48 model of a city he seems 250 feet tall, or if you establish the size of normal people you can use forced perspective to make other actors appear larger or smaller as Peter Jackson did in ‘Lord of the Rings’. A more mundane application is when short star actors are surrounded with short supporting actors so as not to diminish their screen impact. Miniatures present the difficulty of not being able to force the audience to view things in just one way or place them in a consistently scaled environment.

As a miniature sculptor all you have is the proportions of the figure and the scale of any clothing or equipment the figure may have.

Human proportions characteristically vary with the stature of the individual. Setting aside people with glandular anomalies, tall people tend to have smaller heads, proportionally to their bodies, than average. Acromegaly, another cause of great size, causes not only extraordinary stature but also enlarged hands and feet, distortion of bones of the head and proportionally long arms and legs.

Unfortunately these effects are subtle and can easily be ‘washed out’ if a caricature style, already exaggerated is employed.

In life 99% of adults of European ancestry have a head from 1/6.5 to 1/8 of their height, when you see people at either end of this range you notice their very large or very small head but miniature figures can be anything from 1/4 to 1/8. Metal figures generally have heads off the adult normal charts, 1/5 or 1/6 and modern plastics are adopting this stylistic distortion as well.

Fortunately for my problem the figure I made is for a line with relatively realistic proportions.

So I made the figure, who is meant to be ‘closer to eight than seven feet tall’ with a 1/8 head, long legs and arms, big hands and feet and with a sword designed to be wielded with two hands by a normal sized person so that the hilt particularly is long and delicate looking in his hand. His face has the eyes set high with prominent cheek bones and a large jaw and chin. The widely spaced teeth are also characteristic of someone with an above average dose of growth hormone.

The figure is about 45mm tall, 50mm if he were standing up straight, scaled to 1/48 or 7' 9" to scale.

This entry was posted by Tom Meier on Thursday, September 17. 2009 at 09:54. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own blog.