(Above: earlier stage of progress)
I want to thank Anakin Starkiller, NAZGÛL, troopermaster, chefhawk, Darth_Finger, HAL9000, zenwalker, NoHumorMan, and Ghost for their most kind and supportive words. I'm absolutely floored by the encouragement! I thought I'd start a new thread here in the WiP Forum since this is technically still a work in progress. How this started was I needed a break from all my Vader-related sculpting projects. You can't believe how much there is to fuss over. The Vader-related politics, bickering, etc. were starting to get frustrating, and I needed the hobby to be restful, relaxing, restorative and - above all - plain and simple fun.
Sculpting is fun and therepeudic for me. I told myself not to sculpt a Stormtrooper, as the TK is perhaps the most illicitly copied and recast helmet in the fandom. I was put off seeing fans ripping fans off. Heck, even the phugly FX has been recast (no accounting for taste!) I don't know what drew me thus to sculpt a Stormtrooper. I'd love to own a TIE Pilot and a Stealth Trooper at some point, but given how one vendor completely ripped me off and never shipping, and another causing a one-month long wait to extend to a whole year, and seeing yet another vendor start off humble but become to be haughty, prideful, and demeaning, I've just about had it with vendors.
But after learning from Brian Muir how Liz Moore sculpted the original stormtrooper, I was mesmerized by the clay sculpture and how she interpreted her nuances and subtleties from those from two dimensional concept illustrations. Vader may be the number one movie villain of all time but the stormtrooper is also a remarkable sculpture. How does someone come up with a design like that in a vacuum? What kind of creative mind interprets mere lines to create all kinds of nuances and subtleties not necessarily even implied on paper?
So this is my informal and personal tribute to Liz Moore.
My error was thinking that the stormtrooper was a simpler sculpt. In one sense, it's simpler than Vader. In another sense, it's easy to get wrong even if you have "accurate" features. When I first started out, I documented my build out but was nervous about unveiling it because so many people have greater expertise. This is my first stormtrooper sculpt, and I honestly haven't studied every square inch like others have. But unlike my Vader projects where the goal is accuracy and that you hope that in the end you'll achieve enough accuracy and will actually enjoy the results, I wanted my Stormtrooper sculpting process to be a fun one, and whatever came of it would be a byproduct of that fun. It doesn't matter if it's not uber accurate, so long as I have fun and enjoy it.
Well, that sure sounds nice and Zen, but then then the accuracy bug bit me in the ass, and I realize I needed to make this more accurate. I didn't want to unveil this until I had achieved a reasonable level of accuracy. I'm glad I did, because some of you pointed out the asymmetries of the original and opened my eyes. My sculpt's face was a bit too narrow, so I decided to sculpt the whole thing a bit wider: