TOM MEIER ON MINIATURES SCULPTING IN TRUE PROPORTION I have no particular argument against most of what Ive 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 its 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 its 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.

Fig 1.

I thought Id do a series of articles on proportions, distortions and how to measure but first Ill lay some groundwork on what it means to say realistic proportions. I see a lot of misinformation about what constitutes the average and the range of human proportions. You can find all sorts of ideal proportion systems in art books, though these rarely go in depth and always seem to be based on some abstract ideal rather than actual observations of real people; for example the common admonition of drawing instruction is that overall height is eight times the height of the head when in reality perhaps one person in fifty has a head so small. Its like calling someone six foot four average height. This is a subject Ive spent a lot of time researching over the years and while I make no claim to definitive knowledge my understanding is aimed at sculpting and perhaps can be made into something solid enough to build on. I welcome correction if it comes with solid evidence and anyone who wants to link or excerpt from this post is welcome. All natural proportions show a degree of variability becoming exponentially less common in

occurrence as you depart from the average, the bell curve, so while its theoretically statistically possible you could have almost any ratio you want, the likelihood of an extreme juxtaposition actually occurring can be about the same as a broken teacup suddenly flying back together. Also, when you get too far from the average the effect can appear freakish. How far you have to go to cross the line depends on the viewers sensitivity, the context and what part of the body you are distorting. Figure collectors for example have become so used to greatly distorted heads and a set of compensatory distortions that a 1/6 head proportion seems realistic. Average height: This varies in time and place, modern U.S. males of European descent average 70.5" modern Dutch are nearly 72" average, while Portuguese are the shortest Europeans at about 68" average. Women are about 7% shorter than men on average. The standard deviation is about 2.85" or 4% so if the average height is 70.5" then 68% of men are between 67.85" and 73.35", and 98% are between 63.8" and 76.3" or a variation of about +/8%. This variation of about +/- 8% is a good rule of thumb which serves pretty well for most human proportions that is to say if you make a part of the body 8% bigger or 8% smaller than average with respect to the other body parts you have distorted it to a point where it represents less than 1% of the population. Going beyond this point there is an exponential increase in rarity so that a 10% distortion is 1 in 200, 12% about 1 in 400etc. thus the likelihood of someone being 20% taller than average or 85"(71") is one in about 200,000 excluding instances of growth hormone disorders. The average height of recruits in the ACW was a bit less than 68" and the average height of the garrison at Heraculaneum was about 66" as was the height of an average Iron Age British male. The average height of Frenchmen drafted into service during the Napoleonic wars was 64.15" (Napoleon was 65" about average height BTW) though it was nearly an inch taller in the following generation. The British Army of WWI average height was 66.5". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_height Head as a proportion of overall height: Modern males, 1/7.65 average with 99% of men falling between 1/6.75 and 1/8. Modern females, 1/7.4 average with 99% falling between 1/6.5 and 1/7.75. People from pre-modern times when average height was less seem to have had proportionally larger heads, or rather their legs and torso seem to have been shorter and their heads the same size. This is something I have noted from measuring old photographs and I dont really know how valid it is. There is a tendency for shorter persons to be towards the higher end of this scale and taller ones towards the lower end i.e. taller persons tend to have proportionally smaller heads and shorter persons larger ones. The position of the eyes in the face: The mid-point of the height of the face is, on average, just slightly above the lower lid of the eye for men with a variation of less than .5" or about 5% of an average 9.25" head. The midpoint of the average womans face seems to be very slightly higher, though this could be a skewing caused by selection of women with eyes nearer the middle of the face for photography. Children have eyes lower in the face than adults. Body Proportions: (average measurements are for a modern American male,i.e. 70.5" in height) The bone of the upper arm (humerus) is about 15% longer than the bones of the forearm (radius and ulna) if you compare a line from the shoulder joint to the elbow with one from the elbow towards the hand the equal point is about the middle of the palm. Average length elbow to fingertip is about 17". The average arm span is slightly more than height. Because of the way the joints of the elbow and shoulder move you can not straightforwardly add the lengths of the bones to get the length of the arm in various positions.

The hand is about 2/3 the length of the forearm the palm width about 1/3. Relating these to overall height would give a ratio of about 1/6.5 for the forearm, 1/10 for the hand and 1/19 for the palm. Average hand length is 7.5", the width across the knuckles of a clenched fist, 3.6". Leg length is a bit more than half height for modern men, measured to the hip socket. The bones of the upper and lower leg are about the same length. I cant find any information for the degree of variability in the ratio. Note this is measuring from the hip socket to the heel and the bones from the hip socket to the knee and the knee to the ankle. I cant find any statistics on the variability of proportion of leg length to overall height but judging by what looks quite odd in either direction compared to the average the extremes would seem to be 46% to 58% of overall height. Women have proportionally slightly shorter legs on average; thats not a misprint, women have as a percentage of overall height on average slightly shorter legs than men. Foot to height ratio is about 1/7 on average, about half the distance from the heel to the knee and seems to be more variable than most proportions. Here are also some pictures sf another 1/48 (35mm) F&IW figure I made a couple of years ago but only recently fitted with a musket.

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? Its something we are taught by experience but also something we are predisposed to learn. A small child or a fan of modern art doesnt require much more than a bit of twisted wire or a gl ob 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 Ill 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 Im 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 its 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.

Posted by Tom Meier at 09:54 | Comments (5) | Trackbacks (0) Wednesday, July 8. 2009

All of you who have been waiting so patiently for the Fox WWII figures seem to be in need of some reassurance so Im going to bend my promise to Jim Fox not to show any more pictures of the figures until the release is done. These are not pictures of a figure, only an accessory. I also want to illustrate one of the great difficulties Ive had with this range, to wit, tiny mechanical objects. At the best of times I have never liked making microsculptures of machines. I think this is because the techniques Ive developed dont work on machines very well. Or rather its easier to spot the shortfall between what I make and the ideal. In simple terms they always come out looking a bit rubbery. And yes I know they look good compared to what else is available but Im with Dogberry, "comparisons are odorous". My frustrations with mechanicals led me to once spray-paint "I will not agree to make any more robots" in foot high letters on my workshop wall as a constant reminder after one particularly nasty job for Hasbro. On top of that the bloody thing took longer to make than a whole figure for this line would have from scratch. The same is true of the other ammo carriers and the radio and weapons and the.you get the idea. This would obviously be bad enough if I had time on my hands but I dont, and what little I can make for sculpting is steadily eroding. When Carin (my wife) went back to work two years ago I was still able to work about 30 hours a week but this began to erode almost at once (I leave the reasons to the imagination of all husbands out there) until its now more like 10. But both children will be going to school this fall and there really isnt much left to do on the sculpting. Then I just have to get the fiddly little buggers to cast. For you Brits, the coin in the picture is a U.S. one cent piece, about the size of a hapenny, if you still have hapennies over there, or 19mm in diameter.

There are three main aspects to the problem of comparing figures for compatibility. Each has its own difficulties. The height of the figure along with the scale of any standardized equipment he has. The problem here is the skill and tools required to accurately measure a figure. Nearly all figures are in a posture which, for comparison requires measurement to include an estimation of what the figures height would be if it were standing up perfectly straight. The change in perceived height can vary significantly with a walking posture much less in the sort of active poses favored by gamers. To extract actual from measured height requires skill and study most people lack. The heft of the figure, the girth of the limbs and bulk of the body. Girth in itself is, I think, the least jarring of the variations which must be considered for compatibility, far more important is proportion and to a lesser degree other elements of style such as detailing or the way some elements are depicted. The proportions or relations of the size of the parts of the body to one another is, perhaps even more than overall height the aspect which causes most people to declare figures not compatible. As we see in figure 1. merely increasing the heft of a figure is not very disharmonious but changing the proportions causes quite a clash. (Also note that though the examples all have the same overall height the figure-ized one, because of the distortions on the head and face has the eyes at a different level.) Even in a photograph, without a way of comparing proportions most people cant perceive variations. So you cant measure your way to an adequate definition of compatibility or define it by simple notions like heft. A photograph of the figures you would like to compare side by side would be ideal but is quite impractical given the astronomical permutations. Putting a ruler or a grid in photos has several difficulties as well. Macro photography can introduce distortions depending on the placement of objects and the angle of the picture. In particular a grid or ruler behind a figure can make it appear to be quite different from its actual size (figure 2). Its to solve these difficulties I suggest posed silhouettes in photos taken alongside the figure (figure 3). As can be seen its only necessary to have the legs and body posture approximately match the figure. The silhouettes should use modern natural proportions such as those established by the U.S. army because any other standard is open to dispute. I enthusiastically support any sculptors developing a style but how can one of these take precedence over another? Nature is self-evidently the ultimate frame of reference for representative art. This doesn't mean you must slavishly follow nature any more than your figures must be an even number of millimeters in height.

Figure 1. Figure 2. Figure 3. Figure 4. Which?

Posted by Tom Meier at 11:44 | Thursday, February 12. 2009 Comments (4) | Trackbacks (0)

Distorting the proportions of head, limbs and body, the size of hands and feet are manipulations which could be understood as a stylistic choice but some common proportional anomalies just seem to be misunderstandings. Of these the most common seems to be the

forearm. The bones of the forearm, the radius and the ulna are shorter, I repeat SHORTER than the bone of the upper arm, the humerus, There is some natural variation in how much shorter but they are always shorter in humans without deformity. This is obviously not always true of miniature figures. Why? Ive heard the theory its an effect of distorting the size of the hands. Im inclined to discount this as it seems to occur even when the hands show little or no distortion. My view is its more likely a misapprehension of the way the elbow works and how this confuses the perception of the arm in different positions. I could spend a lot of time describing the way the elbow joint slides around the end of the humerus but a picture really is worth a thousand words, (fig 1). I think the main source of confusion is the way the joint opens and rolls when fully extended. It is important to understand the point of the elbow is not the pivot. On another subject, here is a proposal I made over on The Miniatures Page for a system to compare the size of figures from pictures online using standardized silhouettes on a grid, the advantages of this system are: It is cheap, once the silhouettes are set up and easily distributed to manufacturers and reviewers. It does not require any point or standard of measurement e.g. ankles to the kneecaps or ears to navel. It allows the heft as well as the height to be compared. It uses reality as a standard for comparison (the silhouette in the example is from a Muybridge photo) so no arguments about whos style to use as a standard. If manufacturers dont want to use the standard or try to manipulate it, reviewers can correct the deficiency.

Figure 1

Posted by Tom Meier at 08:32 | Comments (5) | Trackbacks (0) Tuesday, September 9. 2008

Here are some shots of thought you all might find them amusing. On to womens legs as promised:

the various revisions of Dannis (lack of) hair, I

One of the most common anatomical distortions in figures and indeed all representations of women is the length of their legs. So much is pretty obvious to anyone who has ever paused to think about it but we want a more thorough understanding of how much and in what way conventional representations depart from reality. First I have a shocking revelation for all males out there. Women, according to the U.S. army who have taken a measuring tape to a rather large sample, have on average proportionally shorter legs than men. Oh the humanity! How is this possible you ask? Have men been blind. The answer is, shoes and confusion about where the waist is. You see a mans waist, (though this may not be true of many gamers) is generally reckoned to be just above his hips because his ribcage is about as wide as his pelvic bone. A typical woman by contrast has a hipbone wider than her ribcage making the narrow point higher. Figure 1.

So, typically how long are womens legs? The average for Europeans is a bit less than half overall height from hip-joint to sole of foot. Perhaps more interesting, the difference between extraordinarily long and extraordinarily short legs for two women of the same overall height is only about three inches (7.5cm). But the problem of distortion doesnt end there. When legs are extended many sculptors seem to be under the delusion arm length should follow torso length.. This seems to be the result of formulas they learned in art books saying the arms at the sides should fall to a certain point. The problem with such formulas is they only hold for the average. When lengthening womens legs to a degree only one woman in a hundred shows in real life is a normal distortion you cant then apply a formula for arm length meant for a woman with real normal proportions. In fact arm length in women with extremely long legs tends to follow leg length. The long bones tend to all be longer together. Just to show biological forms dont follow neat abstract formu las (Leonardo take note), women with shorter legs do have arms which seem to follow torso length. (figure 2) Next time, elbows and forearms.

Figure 1 Figure 2
Posted by Tom Meier at 07:14 | Comments (20) | Trackbacks Saturday, August 30. 2008 (0)

Ive finally finished a long run of toy work and have time to get back to the Fox WWII minis and, with John Kellners help, bringing out some of the figures I made a while ago. These are to include two wolves, three human (Byzantine) infantry a wood elf noble in traveling clothes and a goblin captain. Here are some shots of a second wolf I had done a while back but had not taken pictures of. Now a bit about proportions. There is a lot of discussion about realism in miniatures particularly with respect to proportions and anatomy. From what seems to pass for good or realistic I get the impression actual anatomy and proportion is little known or generally misconceived. Ive spent some time researching the subject over the years so I thought Id set down what Ive learned. People are obviously not standardized industrial products, they vary but they do not vary in a completely random way, nor are variations or degrees of variation equally common. Adult male humans can be anything from two to nine feet tall but only one in forty European males are shorter than 54" or taller than 64" with 7 out of 10 being 57" to 61". Likewise the relations of the parts of the body to one another, the size of hands varies from about three to five inches across the knuckles but large hands almost always belong to large people, small hands to small ones. Variations do not occur independently but as a cluster of normal related proportions. An important example is, modern European males are about 7.5 times the height of their head tall on average, that is to say 80% of them are 7.25 to 7.75 and less than one in a thousand adult males has a head larger than 6.5 or smaller than 8.25. Women tend to have very slightly proportionally larger heads. Old photographs seem to show people in the 19th century were shorter than moderns but their heads were the same size, that is the long bones of the legs and arms were shorter so the average head to body ratio moves to about 7 heads for men. Small scale gaming figures (less than 54mm) even the ones praised for their realistic proportions are 4.5 to 5.5 heads or occasionally 6, which are the normal proportions of a child (see figure 1). The exception is many 1/72, 1/76 plastic figures. The face has normal proportions as well. The eyes of an adult male are generally slightly higher on

the face than a child or a female. The center point being between the pupil and the lower lid of the eye on average. Eyes higher or lower than this by even a few millimeters begin to look odd, move the eye more than a half inch either way and you are outside the range where 99% of adults fall. The relatively restricted position of the eye near the middle of the head is one reason why measuring figures -"to the eyes because if the figure is wearing a hat or helmet you cant tell where the top of the head is" - makes no sense. If you can see the eyes you know how much taller the figure is within an inch to scale (assuming the figure is not grossly distorted, see below), on a 30mm figure thats less than half a millimeter. Again small scale gaming figures, even those praised for their realism tend to have absurdly low foreheads and oversized features. I expect this is probably to allow the sculptor to fit more detail on a smaller figure, essentially whats being done is squeezing facial features which would be realistic for a 54mm figure on a 30mm one (figure 2).

Finally there is the difference between male and female faces from a sculptural perspective. Stripped of makeup the differences between the male and the female face is very slight, though our perception is attuned to it so it seems greater. Women have slightly less prominent brows, more delicate jaw and very slightly fuller lips, smaller ears and nose on average. Having said that there is an overlap, men with faces that look feminine and women with masculine faces. I suspect most males are so used to seeing females in makeup they would think just from the unpainted face half women were males without cosmetics. (figure 3). Small figures generally overcome this difficulty by making female faces into cartoons with absurdly fine jaws, tiny nose, huge lips, in other words a barbie-doll face. This makes miniature female faces very much alike as there isnt much room for variation in such a formula. Next time, womens legs (and arms).

First a few questions which have come in: "I was curious how Tom sculpted the beard on the Joseph nativity figure" With hair I use several techniques depending the texture. The important thing the remember is you cant really recreate most kinds of hair in small epoxy sculpture so you have to depict it by the impression it gives. In the case of Joseph I didnt really have to think about it since I was basing the style on Renaissance woodcuts where fine close set lines are juxtaposed with clear space to get textural effects. I represented this effect in sculpture by forming the mass of the beard while the putty was very soft and cutting lots of fine parallel lines with my blunt exacto palette knife. I pushed this mass around to the shape I wanted thus stretching and to some extent smoothing and blending the lines. Then before the epoxy set too much I went in with a pin (the hook end of one of my tools) and teased out tiny loops. Rather like the technique for making chain mail but as random extensions of the wavy parts of the beard. "When you are doing armor, after you have done your initial shaping and smoothing of the surface, do you later go back and trim it when the epoxy-resin/putty has set to a specific point, or do you wait for it to cure completely before doing a final shaping and polishing?" I have tried everything I can think of with plate armor and not yet found a quick or completely satisfactory way to make it. Its a pain. I nearly always make the plates smooth then add details with a separate piece of epoxy. I try to avoid trimming and polishing as it opens pores in the epoxy surface, though this is a good thing if I want to stick something to it. The most important thing is to apply the final coat of epoxy thin for control. "do you do one layer and let it cure

completely before moving to the next?" It depends how separate they are to appear. Id always apply a paldron separately and I apply the knee and elbow pieces after Ive made the underlying plates but not the segments in an arm piece or around a knee which lie very flat to each other.

The length of womens legs is so regularly distorted in representations it is common, for men particularly, to think it normal for a womans legs to be a good deal more than half her height. In fact on average they are a bit less than half (see figure #2). High heeled shoes, which aid the illusion are a relatively recent invention, appearing for men in the mid 16th century (to help keep feet in stirrups) and adopted by women shortly thereafter, though in womens case it was not to accentuate the legs, which were not exposed, but to increase overall height. The third picture is a teaser for ser Loras.

Figure 1