FAQ

I never thought that this would ever be necessary, but many people seem to be interested in my sculptures and have asked me many questions. I really appreciate the interest, but answering the same questions over and over gets a little tiring. So in this journal I will make a list of FAQ (frequently asked questions) and try my best to answer them. The list will be updated when people start asking questions that are not on the list already. Anyway, here goes:

1. For your collages, do you make multiple sulptures or is it just one sculpture?
Actually it's always just one single sculpture which is poseable so I change the pose for every photo. Sometimes I have to replace certain parts of the body though, like in the collage of my Kirby sculpture. For the "inhale pose" and the "inflated pose" I made new bodies, detached the arms and feet from the old body and put them on the new ones. In the same way I can change a sculpture's clothing.  For example, if I want to make a Fire Mario, I don't make an entirely new sculpture, I just make Fire Mario's cap and clothing, take the head, gloves and shoes from the original Mario sculpture and combine them with the new clothes and voila: a Fire Mario. Of course this process is completely reversible. It's like a dress-up doll. Just better!

2. How can your sculptures be poseable?
My sculptures are made of a material that does not harden. Therefore they stay soft forever and can always be changed or altered. The benefit of that is that my sculptures can bend into basically any pose and are very flexible (but they're still amenable to the laws of physics, of course). They can even move their eyes and open and close their mouth if they have them.
The detriment of their softness is that it makes them very fragile and vulnerable to heat and pressure. They also collect dust which sticks to them, so they have to be kept in vitrines.

3. What kind of material do you use for your sculptures?
I use a special kind of clay that is extremely light so the sculptures made of it don't have to support much weight and most of them can stand on their own. I believe it is something like plasticine, but I'm not sure if it's really the same. The material's name is "Aquasoft", because it is so light that it can swim on water. The brand's name is "Staedler", but Aquasoft is a German product so I doubt that you'll find it elsewhere. I usually buy it on the internet.

4. Do you put any kind of wire skeletons or frameworks into your sculptures?
No, my sculptures don't need that. But sometimes I put other things in them, not for stabilising them but to fill up some space so that I don't have to use up so much clay.  Most of my larger sculptures have something else inside them so that not too much clay has to be used to make them. So sometimes you can find marbles or nuts or pieces of wood inside my sculptures.
But in some occasions I have to use wires, for example when sculpting a creature with antennae that are too thin to support their own weight.

5. Are you selling your sculptures or do you take commissions?
Many people have asked this question and many have told me that I could make lots of money with it. I have actually already sold some of my works. I never sell the sculptures I have at home but if a client wants to buy a sculpture I ask them for a detailed description or a reference of what they want to have, then I produce the desired sculpture and sell it to them. But the clients I had so far were all persons that I knew personally and I always brought the sculptures to them myself. I never sold a sculpture via the internet. In fact I don't even know if that is possible. As I stated above my sculptures are very fragile and could easily be damaged when shipped. I always glaze a sculpture before I sell it since that makes them a little more stable but even after that they're rather delicate and it also makes them lose their flexibility. I am planning to find out soon wether they can be shipped or not, and if it is possible I might open for commissions. I'll anounce that in another journal.

6. How long does it take you to make a sculpture?
That really depends on the sculpture. Complex sculpture with many details or a difficult pattern take long to make, simple sculptures can be done quickly. Easy sculptures take some hours or sometimes a day to make, hard sculptures take multiple days and sometimes even weeks. But it also depends on the size, because putting details on a very small sculpture is harder than putting them on a large one, in my opinion.

7. How big are your sculptures?
Whenever I post a Weekly Sculpture I put its name and size in the description, so check that for information on their height. As for my sculptures in whole I always try to keep the right proportions, for example making Luigi taller than Mario and Blastoise a little smaller than Charizard. But for the Pokémon, I don't use the Pokédex data as a reference, I always use the 3D games, because...well, according to Pokédex Arbok is 3,5 meters high, so yeah, doesn't seem very legit to me...

8. Do you make a new sculpture every week and upload them afterwards?
No, even though I craft at least one new sculpture per week (usually it's much more than that...) it's almost never that sculpture that I upload. I actually have lots and lots of sculptures standing around in my room so whenever I want to make a collage I choose a sculpture, take it out of the vitrine, take some photos and put it back in. Right now I think I have about 630 sculptures in total. And that number does not even include all the alternate clothings for some sculptures, like Kirby's ability hats...

9. Do you ever do anything else than sculpting?
If sleeping and eating doesn't count...no, actaully not.
Well, I also play video games, and I also draw sometimes, but the rest of my freetime is occupied by SCULPTURES!!
If I had a life, sculpting would be it.

10. How long have you been workig with clay now?
Oh, let's see... if I remember correctly I started sculpting when I was in preschool, at the age of six. Of course my first attemps looked just hideous, and even the sculptures that I made only five or six years ago seem like total abominations to me today, but I guess it's all practice.

11. How's your grandma?
She's fine, thanks for asking. She's been a little under the weather, but she's much better now.

12. Would you marry me?
Oh, come on, you couldn't be that desperate!

13. I think your sculptures look awesome!
That's not a question, but thanks anyway.

Hope that answers your questions! If you still have some questions or if you just wanna give me some feedback, feel free to comment!