I actually sat back and watch the video again, this time taking note of when things happen. As Adam Clarke was looking forward to learning how to sculpt figures with attention to detail and texture as Adam Beane does, I think I'll address this first. This video -is not- for that. Which is sad because that's also why I wanted to video, to learn more about doing beautiful detail work.
Let me get into a more general overview of what the video has though by breaking it down into times.
7 minutes in Adam has given us an overview of sculpting materials and what sculpting creates... "From action figures, ordainments and Easter bunnies." He continues this with bike seats, shoes and so on.
12 minutes into his 60 minute video, Adam has finally begun working on the figure.
16 minutes in, the 'figure' is sort of a mass of tootsie roll looking shapes, which is fine, but it's at this stage that he mentions he's going to give us detail on anatomy and detail in his video on figure sculpting....... Keeping in mind, we're watching him sculpt a figure at this point, but have been told we won't be getting into that till another video. 16 minutes into the video we all just waited over a year to get.
At 28 minutes in we leave figures. So if we're keeping track of the timeline... we began sculpting at 12 minutes, giving us roughly 16ish minutes of what we all came here for.
The rest of the video plays out like a TAP Plastics instructional video and I found it not to be useful to relevant to my figure sculpting in any way, as it isn't about figure sculpting for starters, but also because unless you're using castilene wax or another sculpting wax, these techniques will not work for your medium. It's at this point I'd like to point out... for everyone who noticed that Adam met a lot of his criticism about the video with mentions of Cx5 (he mentions it 3 times above, for example), we hear A LOT of mention of the Cx5 in the video, which you might expect if Cx5 were the only material to do the things that it does, but Cx5 is simply a wax sculpting medium, and the things done in it can be replicated using any other wax meant for sculpture, of which there are several available both from large companies and small. And yet listening to Adam in the video, it seems that only Cx5 can be worked in these ways, which is not so.
I felt a little uncomfortable giving this much detail because, as I said, I don't want to take anything away from Adam here - I like his Cx5 (which is the obvious focus of this Kickstarter and not a video), though it isn't special in the world of sculpting material, I enjoy that unlike some waxes, my hands stay feeling very clean. I actually have a hard time working for long periods in plasticine because of the unpleasant feeling oil clay leaves on my hands while I work.
My overall impression of the video is, that this is a marketing presentation for Cx5 with almost no value to a sculptor with even a passing knowledge of what they're doing, as it gives broad generalizations but offers no detail, especially for the very briefly touched upon figure sculpting, which is what I think brought us all here to the video to begin with... the promise of learning how Adam does what he does.
I'll always think Adam is an amazing sculptor, but at this point I also believe that he has absolutely no business being a teacher at this point in his life. And if I'm being honest... his greatest skill seems to be for spin doctoring an unhappy crowd of people (in this case internet people), by doing things like blaming the delayed release on the Conan sculpt.. Since the sculpture appears for such a brief time that it could have been left out completely with no damage to the video, but for a while there we were all under the impression that we were just waiting on that... which of course wasn't the case, as it turned out months after the sculpture was released and no video was forthcoming.
There are going to be a lot of head shaking people when orders start coming in, and I'm one of them.
....I WROTE YOU FROM MY PRIVATE EMAIL....
