Troll Anatomy 101
I honestly believe that going to the gym has helped me understand how to sculpt better because you create mind-muscle connections and learn how to use your muscles to move your body in certain ways. As you can see on my yhetee, his pecs (chest muscles) are slightly different shapes and look slightly different in size. In reality, I used the same amount of green stuff, moulded into roughly the same shape before adding them to the mini. I then stretched and smoothed the muscle so that both muscles were attached to the correct point on the model; the right pec looks smaller as it is in a stretched position whereas the left side of his upper body is in a pronated position (shoulders forward, palms down) and the chest is naturally more tensed. The opposite is true of the delts (shoulder muscles), where the right is naturally more tensed. I’d taken pictures of myself in the yhetee’s position for reference but the real difficulty here is translating human physique onto the frame of a trollish beast. As humanoids they would have the same basic musculature but with different positioning and proportions which is proving a little bit of a challenge.
So I created for myself a troll anatomy guide based partially on a stone troll, just for reference.
The two top drawings are sketches of a stone troll as it’s fairly similar to the shape I’m going for. I then tried to work out where humanoid muscles would be placed within that frame and what sort of size they’d be. The lower picture is an example of the final piece I’m going for but with the arm in a different position for simplicity. What’s cool about this is I can create a scale version of the anatomy on my computer screen, allowing me to clearly see what size and shape i need to make out of greenstuff before adding it to the model.
I’ve some concerns about how small his pecs are at the minute as you’d expect someone with such a hyper-pronated stance to have very powerfully built pecs and biceps and relatively underdeveloped back muscles. This guy, however has a huge back and quite a small chest. I guess climbing mountains and picking up rocks and such all day might give you a hunched appearance along with a hypertrophied back. I’m gonna go with that explanation
Sorry if that was a boring read, muscular anatomy fascinates me and I thought it might be useful for some beginner sculptors like myself out there. Let me know if you want any more explanation.
