I have no particular argument against most of what I’ve seen on the web in the way of miniature sculpting tutorials. One of the exceptions is the dictum, "if you get the proportions of your armature right, the proportions of the final figure will be right". Prefabricated armatures save a lot of time and if you are making a living sculpting this is very important, but the tendency to regard such an armature as having some corrective agency is a misuse.There are at least two easy ways to go wrong with an armature which I will try to illustrate.
I choose the elbow not because it’s the easiest place to go wrong, all the joints cause difficulties, but the elbow is the simplest to illustrate and because it is often not covered with rigid clothing in the finished figure it’s easier to see how commonly it is distorted in miniature sculpture.
The first problem is; simply bending a wire or casting at the joint does not precisely imitate the action of a joint. If you measure the armature in one position then bend it into another, distortion is introduced to the degree of deflection.
For example, if you mark the correct place for the elbow joint on a wire which is the armature for an extended arm, then simply bend the wire at that place, you will end up with a change in the proportion of upper to lower arm because the elbow, despite being described by analogy as a ‘hinge joint’ in fact acts by sliding around and opening unlike common hinges or bent wires.
See figure 1.
The second way armatures fail to prevent errors in proportion is in the way you coat them. If you are depending on the armature to imitate the skeleton, failure to cover the armature in the same way the bone is covered by tissue introduces more error.
The common result of bending an armature at the elbow without taking account of the way the joint actually works and covering it without regard to the way the bone actually sits in the musculature of the arm is to exacerbate what I call Absurdly Long Miniature Forearm Syndrome or ALMFS. A tendency to which small figures are already inclined because of oversize hands.
See figure 2.
So if you are going to use the armature as a guide to proportion you must be very careful. I usually find it easier to measure the epoxy as I go along, adjusting to compensate for the pose and disregarding the armature unless it pokes out.
Here are some pictures of another of the F&IW figures, a ‘long hunter’.
