Lil' Dan

I don't do commissions, OK?
I don't do commissions because commissions mean expectations and deadlines and stress and commissions are hard. I sculpt because it's fun and commissions are not fun. Not even a little bit. So I don't do them even for a friend. Except when the friend has cleverly primed the pump by presenting me with a subject I find intriguing.
Laura didn't know she was doing this of course, or at least I don't think she did, but she is a devious little hobbit.

As far as I know she just told me about her friend Dan she met briefly at ComicCon last year. When I gave her her sculptures she mentioned that she'd like to commission me to do one of him. I was reluctant of course, that commission thing is always worse when it's a friend or your wife that you're going to be letting down if you blow the deadline (the wife commission lesson is another story and will probably never see the light of cyberspace). Oh, and I always blow the deadlines. Every single time. Reliable as clockwork.

Dan in this case is Dan Silver. I'd never heard of him before Laura mentioned him as though I should know who he was. He's apparently well known in the Crossfit community and he's certainly a far better Crossfitter than I will ever be. He's interesting, edgy, heavily tattooed, an author, a singer, plays pretty darn good guitar even if in a genre I'm not enormously fond of, loves irish music (well doesn't everyone?) and disgustingly, is apparently a very nice guy. Oh and he's not bad looking. The clincher though is that he is a member of a profession that I hold in very high esteem. He does a job that is usually thankless and that I could not do if I tried for a million years. It's pretty common knowledge what it is, but I'm not going to say right here for a variety of reasons and it's my blog with a readership of about 3 so who cares anyway?

Dan is fairly prolific online, he has a "tortured artist" site, a "silly comedy site", a site/niche on red room and his wife Tonya is a photographer with her own online portfolio, some of which features Dan. So I was very lucky that there was a reasonable amount of photographic material available to use as references. And given those damn tattoos, more on which later, I was going to need it all. From those sites I was also able to get a picture of Dan's interests to include in the piece.
Specifically they were comics, video games and skateboarding. He has others I'm sure, but Laura wanted to present him as geek-Dan. Apparently he thinks that's an accurate description, but anyone who does what he does for a living as well as he apparently does it is no geek.
I work in the IT industry. I know geeks.

Dukit polymer clay as always.
As usual I started with the head to give me some proportions to work to. I really should have put more effort into the shape of the skull, it hurt me later.


Added the eyes and ears. I figured out how to do hazel eyes after I'd done this bit. Lil' Dan had to make do with green. I had the nose spot on at one stage, but I lost that somewhere along the line.


And then I made a really really serious mistake.
Having got this far I always bake the head before I add the hair. If I don't the hair adheres really well and I don't have to worry about the hair lifting off the head, but, I can't adjust the hairline. I have to get the clay in exactly the right place and not move it or I'll leave smudges all over the skin colour. And of course I risk undoing all my careful work getting the facial features looking something like the subject if I knock it as I wrestle with the hairline.

I didn't bake the head.

I wanted to show Laura what it was going to look like with the hair on and rushed into it (see, commissions?). As soon as I put the hair coloured clay on the head I knew instantly what I'd done. And of course I didn't get the hairline right. I had to adjust it several times and that took a lot of careful blending, adjustment and bad language. About 5 hours of it. I was so angry with myself.

The hairline was a mission for another reason. Dan doesn't have the same haircut in any two photos I've seen of him and his beard changes constantly too. The sideboards he wound up with are one of the ways he wears his hair, but that was actually an excuse I used to cover up one of the places where I applied the hair coloured clay incorrectly and left marks I couldn't disguise any other way. Shh, don't tell anyone!

Dan has very closely cropped hair and always seems to have a 5 o'clock shadow. I puzzled for a while about how to achieve those and eventually stippled the hair with an old toothbrush to get a bristly texture and then lightly stippled the jawline. In a stroke of genius (it's my story, leave me alone) I used a piece of hair coloured clay as a brush and stroked it along the beard line. It left enough clay behind to look like 5 o'clock shadow and was far more effective than using paint. I hadn't heard of using that technique before so I'm taking credit for developing it.



Next I roughed out a core for the body.

I got Lynette to take a photograph of me in roughly the pose I wanted to capture and sculpted the legs. The soles of the shoes caused me some grief. I entirely messed up getting the white layer wrapped around the tan section, but there you go. I took a punt that Dan wears his cuffs rolled up sometimes based on a photograph of him skateboarding where he'd done just that. I assume to avoid trapping the cuffs in the wheels?

Head attached to the body and showing the neck and throat tattoos. The throat tattoos were covered up later, but I wanted them there just in case they did show.


The body clothed and with the Flogging Molly Logo transferred on. I used Lazertrans Silk transfer paper to create a transfer of the logo. It's actually a bit large, the shirt that Dan has with the logo on has it smaller.
Corrugated board as an armature for the chair.


Dan is apparently a fastidious comic book collector and has them all carefully filed away in protective sleeves. I thought it would be fun to poke some fun at that and have him using a stack of rare collectors items as a foot rest. Lazertrans again to transfer the images to white clay, then the clay was trimmed and stacked. Technically Dan would have to own about 12 copies of some of the most valuable comics in the world if the sculpture were accurate, but that's artistic license.

He's holding an XBox 360 controller which took a lot of fiddling to get right. I'm not a gamer and had no idea what one looked like.



Somewhere along the line I sent Laura a progress shot showing all the components roughly assembled sitting on a CD case. She commented that the CD showed the scale and I started thinking that one of Dan's interests I hadn't covered was his music. I verified that the sculpture would fit on a CD and sacrificed a lightscribe CD to mock up a CD from one of Dan's old bands. Lightscribe seemed appropriately homemade as the band, umm, "lacked commercial success".

I sandwiched the lightscribe CD between 2 clear protective CD covers to give the base some thickness and epoxied them together. The chair and stack of comics are bolted through the base and glued down. I can't make it bullet proof, but it won't be flimsy if I can help it.



The finished product showing some of the tattoos. The blasted eagle on his neck wound up looking like a budgie, but I captured the tattoos on the back of the hands fairly well I think. I had a bad moment when I thought I'd messed up the rose on the left hand, but I managed to recover it and it actually wound up being better the right. Oh, the tattoos were drawn on the unbaked clay with fine tipped felt markers and then the clay baked. The markers clogged horribly when used on raw clay so the process was rather frustrating.



And the man himself holding the finished product when Laura and Lynette presented it to him at ComicCon. I couldn't be there, I was at my Level 1 Crossfit Cert at Brand X.
I finished only a few days before we flew over so I was able to hand deliver it to Laura in person. That was nice.
She's a great lady and a good friend even if she does get me to do commissions!



Looking at this I keep thinking that I really messed up the shape of the skull and the distance between the eyebrows and eyes. No matter, I'll do better on the next one.

Apparently he liked it. HUGE relief

There are many more photos available here if you're interested.