Make Your Own Sculpting Tools - A Guide About How To Build Sculting Tools To Sculpting In Small Scales - G. Schellert
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The content of this book was originally published in my web blog. For more
convenience, I merged all post from the blog into this book.
In this book I will present some ideas and tutorials about sculpting tools and how to
build them on your own.
When I say "sculpting tools", I mean those special tools for sculpting Miniatures in very
small scales like 30mm or 54mm. So for the "more typical" sculptor, who does stuff in a
larger scale, it might be not the most useful book, but maybe there will be also things,
that might be interesting for him (or her).
So before I start, some words about my personal view on sculpting miniatures:
When I was young (it was in the early 80´s) I discovered the game Dungeons and
Dragons (maybe there are some people around, that still know it). So short after that I
get in contact with those fantasy miniatures that we used in combination with D&D
(made by companies Citadel/Games Workshop and Ral Partha for example). I was very
fascinated by these miniatures for all their details and so I tried to make my own
miniatures. In that time, sculpting miniatures was a very exotic hobby in fact, it still is). I
didn’t know anyone else personally who did the same thing at this time and there was
no internet to search for sculpting fellows.
I made my first miniatures with FIMO, that’s a polymer putty, that has to be heated to
harden. Then I discovered the two part epoxy-putty Milliput in a shop and did a lot of
miniatures with it until someone gave me my first pack of a now famous putty called
green stuff, which was a real break-through in sculpting for me.
In the beginning, I made casting moulds with rtv-silicone from my sculpts and cast them
in white metal for me and my friends. Later I sold a lot of my sculpted miniatures to a
German company called EXCALIBUR, who spin-cast them in white metal and sold them.
The company still exists and the funny thing is, that some of my old (and quite crappy, to
be honest) miniatures are still in their range.
It was somewhere in the early 90´s, when I loose interest in sculpting miniatures for a
couple of reasons and I completely forgot about it for more than ten years. Then in 2006
I rediscovered my old hobby and I was fascinated, how much miniature sculpting has
evolved since then. Thanks to the internet, there are large communities of sculptors,
who share there work and ideas.
So I started again a little bit of sculpting and it was a real nostalgic thing for me, not only
because my first new sculpts resemble the characters, that I and my old friends play in
our D&D-sessions when we where kids.
When I have a look at miniature sculpting now I sometimes wonder where it might go.
Since my early sculpting days, the technology especially regarding to computers, 3d
software and rapid prototyping evolved so much, that I ask myself, if in ten years there
might be still sculptors, who do their sculpts by hand.
But now there are still a lot of sculpting people around. When I came back to sculpting, I
discovered, that despite all those years, that have passed since my first sculpt, it is still
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not easy to get the right tools to work with. In fact, the only innovation regarding
miniature-sculpting-tools I discovered where the so called clay shapers.
An interesting thing is, that a lot of tools, that claim to be especially dedicated for
sculpting miniatures, are -regarding to size and quality- not ideal to tell it in a more
friendly way.
There are very few high-quality-tools you can buy, that are especially made for sculpting
in small scales. Most of the time sculptors use some kind of dental tools, which is ok for
most of the sculpting tasks.
After struggling some times with different tools, I started to make my own sculpting
tools to get exactly the tools I need. Because I saw in other blogs and on different forums
that "the right sculpting tools" is an interesting point for a lot of people, I decided to start
this little Blog to share some of my ideas with the community and hopefully inspire
some people to make there own sculpting tools.
So that’s was this book is all about. Here you will find here some tutorials on how to do
your own sculpting tools.

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