Turning a Drawing into a Person (and Fighting Chavant Along the Way)

https://youtube.com/shorts/pynNKb1JIX0?si=OPXACnI4ZEe3AjnR

Onslow Higginbottom started as a scribble.

A quick sketch. Nothing precious. Just an idea on paper that made me laugh enough to keep going.

Then I made the mistake of trying to turn him into a real thing.

What I didn’t realise at the time was that I wasn’t just building a character — I was learning an entirely new material at the same time.

Chavant.

I’d never used it before. Not once.

And it shows.

The process started simple enough:

build an armature, bulk it out with foil, get the proportions somewhere near human, somewhere near Onslow. That part makes sense. It’s structural. Logical.

Then the Chavant goes on.

And everything changes.

It doesn’t behave like the clay I’m used to. It doesn’t respond the same way to tools. It doesn’t forgive you. You don’t just push it around and expect it to cooperate — you have to learn how it wants to move.

So what I thought would be “start sculpting” quickly turned into 40–50 hours of trial, error, reworking, scraping back, building up, and occasionally just staring at it wondering why his jumper looks like it’s melting.

The jumper, by the way, has been a battle in itself.

Fabric in drawing is one thing. Fabric in sculpture is something else entirely. Every fold has to feel right. Not perfect — just believable. And that’s where the real work is happening: not in making it neat, but in making it convincing.

What’s surprised me most is how much this process slows you down — in a good way.

You’re forced to actually look.

Not glance. Not assume. Properly look.

At form. At weight. At how things sit on a body.

It becomes less about “making something” and more about understanding it.

And somewhere in the middle of all that, Onslow starts to show up.

Not fully formed. Not finished. But present.

That’s the bit I’m interested in.

Because this isn’t about rushing to a final piece. It’s about dragging a character out of an idea and into something you can walk around, stare at, and argue with.

This is the first one.

It’s rough in places. It’s taken longer than expected. It’s not finished.

But it’s working.

And more importantly, it’s teaching me how I want to work going forward.

Chavant isn’t going anywhere.

Neither is Onslow.