I've talked about my favourite sculptors on here recently but there's another, related, topic that I thought I might bring up: influences. I started sculpting in 1999 and, as we all do, I tended to look at other artists' work to work out how I should do things.
I kind of churned through my first few sculpts with no real thought as to the style as I was preoccupied with actually managing to finish the figs. Brian Ansell remarked that there was a similarity to early Jes Goodwin in them. Quite a compliment to the work and curiously there doesn't seem to be much of that left in my current style...
It was when I went to work at Foundry that I started to look at other sculptor's ways of doing things and applying them to my own figures. In those early days I often looked at the works of Chris Fitzpatrick whose sculpting I greatly admired for it's paintability. Chris's work is very, very clean and rewards clean painting without needing to resort to drybrushing. I'd also often look at Kev White's work from Void which was in it's early stages at the time. I liked the clean simplicity of the troopers again yet without any compromise in character. Obviously, working at Foundry, Mark Copplestone was an influence as his stuff was everywhere though less so with the Perry Twins' work as their sculpting style is rather different to my approach.
I turned a few corners after looking a lot at Mike Owen's work on the Foundry Old West range. Mike was doing a lot of work with sweeping coats and I really liked the style of drapery. It was a nicely dramatic look on the figures and it's one of the things that I feel has always stuck in my work. I do like those sweeping lines on a figure. And I forever looked at Brian Nelson's work as probably the greatest example of the style I'd like to sculpt in. I'm a huge fan of Brian's earlier work. I loved how unrestrained it was.
My own style really started coming out with the launch of Spyglass Miniatures in 2003. I saw the style as a fusion of Mark Copplestone and Kev White, and generally trying to be Brian Nelson. I kept the figures on a tight scale rather than scale creeping to huge sizes.
Really, I've kept in this kind of style area for most of the rest of my career to present. In recent times I've experimented a bit with other styles though. My recent 28mm zombies have a more more reality-based look with proper proportions and a lot more texture after looking at the works of sculptors like Paul Muller and Raul Garcia Latorre.
Currently I'm playing with secret projects that are me playing in a different style sandpit again. Lots of fun stuff... but that's a tale for another day...
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