Lump — Clay-Look Cartoon Ragdoll, Animation Studio, Bristol

Asking a fibreglass shop to make something that looks like modelling clay is asking for trouble, so we were pleased when this one arrived. The client is an animation studio that still builds physical puppets for a living, and they were tired of digital sculpture in their own building.

The brief

A ragdoll cat, flopped on its side, about 1.7 m. The whole piece had to look as though it had been pressed out of clay by hand — including the marks. It also had to survive being outdoors in Bristol, which rules out clay by definition.

Reproducing a hand

We sculpted a small maquette in real clay first, at about 300 mm, and let the studio’s animators handle it until the surface had the right amount of accidental contact. Then we scanned it. The scan was not a shortcut — the clay maquette was the artwork, and the full-size piece is a casting of it.

Every fingerprint in the maquette survives in the mould, and therefore in the sculpture. At 1.7 m those marks are roughly five times life size, which sounds absurd and works completely, because at that scale a thumbprint reads as a landscape feature and gives the eye a reason to move across the surface.

We resisted the temptation to invent extra marks during finishing. What is on the piece is what happened while the maquette was being handled. An invented print is always too regular.

Making clay permanent

The finish is a dead-matte two-pack in six muted earth tones, brushed on rather than sprayed so that the colour sits slightly unevenly and pools a little in the deeper marks, which is exactly what clay does. It is fibreglass and paint; from three metres it is not.

In the courtyard

It has become the studio’s handshake. Visiting directors are walked out to look at it before they are shown any work, and animators touch it on the way in for luck. Nobody is entirely sure when that started.