The Gooier Factor

Preface

Back in 2015, I wrote The Goo Factor, a discussion about all the fleshy details and effects the living animal intrinsically has on their bodies. So now ten years later, I've updated that discussion and added some illustrative images to help along our understanding because it's often through seeing the points discussed that we come to better grasp the concepts, right? So let's dive into this new exploration to reap more squishy insights!...

Introduction

As sculptors of equine realism, we have to balance multiple facets of the animal to recreate a convincing result in clay. Indeed, there are so many variables at play, all existing on a sliding scale of accuracy. Yet at the basis of it all are our anatomy charts, reference photos, field study, and various tidbits from our mental library, all working together to get us as close as possible to achieving that coveted goal of technical realism. As such, bony landmarks, muscle configurations, veining patterns, proportions, planes and placements, contours and angles all consume our attention to ensure we hit our mark. Conformation, breed type, gender characteristics also play their part. Gesture, expression, posture, and composition contribute their necessary qualities, too, as does technique, tool manipulation, and smoothing methods. All these things add their unique and critical touch to our work, hopefully recreating this splendid creature in as faithful a manner we can muster.

Yet there's one aspect of this animal that's so sublime and mercurial that it rarely gets its fair due. And because its qualities morph so quickly and so quirky, they literally go unseen by most. And it's no surprise why anatomy charts lack it altogether since, as a matter of course, it's typically all stripped away to reveal the coveted muscle masses and bony orientations. This element also often goes against the grain in its configurations than are shown on an anatomy chart, perhaps making some shy from expressing them in their sculpture altogether. For all these reasons, many sculptors end up overlooking it completely, focusing almost entirely on everything but this one quintessential element so critical for realism.

Yet this missing element is as important as anything else—yes—even as important as bone, muscle, tendon and ligament, planes, placement and proportion by lending realistic life and moment to flesh. Without it, in fact, it's impossible to convey the essence of living flesh altogether! So if we want to keep our sculptures from appearing too mechanical, more like postured anatomy charts rather than living, breathing beasts, this vital component is an equal imperative in our priority list.

But what is it? What's this elusive substance that goes unaddressed so universally? What could possibly have that much power in our work, yet be so ignored? What could be so critical that goes so missing?

It's goo. Yes—goo. That mushy, gooshy magical substance, that warm wonderful flesh, that glorious jiggly, gooey, squishy stuff we can call goo.

As such, goo is truly one of my most favorite things to sculpt! It's amazing how it'll kick a sculpture up to the next "living" level, ramping up the realism in such a sublime way. A feature of anatomy in the ABCs (anatomy, biomechanics and color genetics), goo is critical for a convincing equine sculpture, one that looks like an actual living animal rather than an artificial, static reproduction. Goo also pulls and pushes anatomy away from its tidy formulas we see on a chart, making flesh exist in a mercurial moment of distortion and novel expression so typical of life. Infuse this into our clay then and we create a piece with more immediacy and anima, one that doesn't exist in a "reality vacuum" of contrived formula or a habitual expression of flesh. Goo also asks us to infuse little details like whisker bumps/moles, veins, capillaries, bug bites, bumps, ripples, and other hide or skin eccentricities that compel our hand away from the contrivance of smooth, polished surfaces and more towards the look of touchable, textured, and imperfect flesh. More still, goo requires us to factor physics more into our compositions, and so we really have to start paying more attention to inertia, centrifugal force, and other forces that impact flesh in so many ways. Similarly, goo needs us to become far more sensitive to the animal as well...far far more. How so? Well, when we're able to key in on their emotional reactions and psychological responses, we can better see how all that is expressed throughout their body in muscle tension or relaxation, balance shifts, posture, bracing, or other biomechanical subtleties, and make no mistake—all that gets expressed in goo, too. So put it all together, we can call all these effects The Goo Factor.

But it doesn't end there! Goo also requires a new kind of Sight, one that actually deepens our appreciation for our craft and this lovely animal in ways that values the esoteric and quirky, things that add dimension and depth to our portfolio. As such, we'll find that infusing goo into our work also helps to really ignite our inspirations and enthusiasm in the studio in whole new ways. Really, goo just makes sculpting that much more fun! What's more, goo infusion requires us to See and interpret flesh in whole new ways, ways that will expand our understanding of anatomy, moment, sculpting technique, and even shift our artistic goals. You see, when sculpting isn't just about capturing this and that accurately, but also about exploring new ways to interpret flesh and how it can break the "rules," our job just became that much more interesting, didn't it?

So how did I have this epiphany about goo? Well, you can thank fat rats. You see, it dawned on me some years back as I was pondering how to take my sculptures beyond the lifeless illustration of an anatomy chart and into the world of fleshy, kinetic animals full of anima and immediacy. Then out of the blue...ta-da! I had a revelation of sorts, inspired by studying the goo on my plump ratties—indeed, it was all about goo! I realized I couldn’t just sculpt the muscle masses as I understood them, as they were depicted in all my anatomy charts—I had to sculpt as they existed in life, and that's very different from a static clinical chart. Flesh doesn’t just hang on the bones like an inert mass nor is it always taut and firm and precisely delineated. It has a life of its own, a morphing resonance with movement, physics, and moment which must be infused to capture that look of living realism, of the "living moment." That's to say while an anatomy chart may be tidy and perfect, Nature is everything but! Absolutely, Nature is mercurial, messy, changeable, and amoebic, it's organic with a logic all its own. It resists the human penchant for order and black-and-white thinking to instead offer us and endless spectrum of options and surprising effects. 

But even more critically, much of The Goo Factor is simply stripped away in dissection such as fat, skin, hide, fascia, and other tissues to expose the musculature and bone. What does this mean? That nearly all our anatomical references are prejudicial. Why? Because these critical gooey qualities rarely, if ever, even make it into anatomical references, in whole or in part, text or illustration, giving us only a fraction of the whole anatomical equation. This is a danger of leaning too much into our anatomical charts then—they don't tell the whole story. There are multiple need-to-know ingredients that are missing! In essence then, if we do lean into those charts too much, too literally, our sculpture will be anatomically incomplete.

What Is Goo?

No matter how fit or fat the animal, all horses have goo. But what is it exactly? Well, it entails all the flesh, really, since all flesh is essentially The Goo Factor itself. Anything that's squishy, fleshy, and deformable is goo. Basically, it's anything that's not bone or cartilage, callus, horn or hair. Going further then, it also entails all the fleshy morphing and movements, the distortions, the compressing and stretching, jiggling, the pooching and squishing, and all the other contortions and changes flesh and muscle undergo in motion and in response to physics, encapsulating the "living moment." Flesh isn't static! It reacts to movement, physics, and emotion in very mercurial, happenstance ways, often contorting and jiggling well away from the neat packages depicted on anatomy charts. For example, fleshy delineations will morph from a standing position to a moving configuration, meaning this: We cannot strictly apply a standing anatomy chart to a moving position as goo simply alters its delineations as its all shifted, squished, and activated. This makes our reference photos and life study so important by providing us the clues and guidance needed for this new territory...so lean into them. In other words, the more your sculpture depicts motion, the more you should be leaning into your references and life study and the more you should be leaning away from a static, standing anatomy chart. Really, our anatomy charts are better used as guides, as simplified, clarifying illustrations, not as gospel. We can never forget two truths about anatomy charts: 1. They were created from dead horses and, 2. they are someone's arbitrary, formulaic attempt to make contrived sense out of messy, chaotic Nature. This is why anatomy charts often differ from each other, why some have missing muscles or elements: Each author interpreted the anatomy differently. So grasp onto anatomy charts lightly.

What's more, we can think of goo as fascia, hide, skin, fat and mushy bits that lie atop and between muscles, tendons, ligaments, cartilage, horn, callous, and bone, which resonates and reacts to movement, tension, and emotion. It's all the extra bits that are so very important for giving our sculpted flesh as much real life as possible. Absolutely, just as structure is to anatomy, movement is to biomechanics, as character is to anima, as moment is to posture—goo is to flesh. It imbues character, quirkiness, life, and moment to our sculpted flesh, so with it, our sculpture will appear more alive, dynamic, more as a living, breathing, fleshy creature existing in a "living moment" rather than a reality vacuum. Because, on the other hand, without it our sculpted flesh will appear mechanical and static, as rigid and dead as an anatomical chart. Our body of work will begin to appear homogenous and predictable, too, since that's all an anatomy chart can offer us, a static, inert formula. The truth is all living horses have living goo, and so our sculptures do best to mimic that if we hope to come as close as we can to not just realism but life, or the "living moment" as well.

But granted, infusing goo isn't easy. Why? Because goo is changeable! It's squishable, mooshable, oozeable, stretchable, wrinkable, compressible, poochable, tension-able, touchable, and oh, so inviting. Don't we love to ooze the gooey parts of our pets? The gushy, warm, fleshy, soft portions like dog ears and faces and necks, and the bellies of our cats? Or the entirety of a glorious rotund rat? 

Well, horses have goo, too! Their fleshy muzzles and eyebrows are obvious examples, as are the fleshy wrinkles between their forelegs. Other examples are wrinkles and folds on the neck and at strategic areas of bending, compression, or twisting. Their muscles can be gooey as well as they distort, mush, pooch, and stretch in relation to motion. They can even jiggle, ripple, and wriggle with the physics of motion, too, or become more rigid and tense with posture, tension, or emotion, so look for all these effects in life study and references. For example, the pectorals are very changeable with posture, tension, and motion, often distorting quite a bit in the mercurial moment. And look for how the triceps can ripple and morph between relaxation and tension in motion. The neck is also quite gooshy, being amoebic in articulation, seeming to gain length when stretched and shorten when tucked. If we play close attention, too, we'll even see that neck muscles can ripple and swing in unison with inertia, say around a tight turn, or pivot, or over a jump. But just as much, also look for goo in hide and fascia detail such as on the neck, shoulders, triceps and hindquarters, for instance, and other areas of the body. Horses are rarely smooth like polished marble, they have texture and often a lot of it! So look for wrinkles, bumps, squiggles, crinkling, bug bites, and all manner of textural details on the living animal you can infuse into your clay. They're going to add so much life to your sculpture being a whole new level of realism to capture!

The Missing Factor

But there's another kind of goo often unnoticed, but vital nonetheless: Fascia. This magical stuff usually gets the short end of the stick in dissections and anatomical illustrations, being treated like a disposable connective tissue of no circumstance. But the fact is fascia is anything but disposable and inconsequential! It glues the skin on, houses the "fly shaker" muscles, binds the entire body together, wrapping around everything, giving shape and support to the muscles, suspending the organs, and creating a network of interconnected, communicating systems that responds to posture, motion, physics, injury, emotion, tension and relaxation just as much as any muscle. It's as much a part of anatomy as any muscle or bone.

Indeed, altogether, it actually constitutes the largest percentage of body tissue and is all made of collagen of varying qualities and textures. Aside from its many structural and connective functions, it also serves as heat sinks, cushions, and tissues that reduce friction and create areas of needed expansion (like around vessels, veins,  and arteries). As such, there are five basic kinds of fascia: 

1. “Spiderweb”: Acts as a supportive, connective, suspensory, shape-making network.
2. “Bubblewrap": Serves as a heat sink, reducer of friction, provider of expansion space, and is also a major kind of contouring fascia. Generally, it has a watery or often oily fluid in it, and sometimes air. For example, there's a lot of bubblewrap fascia under the scapula and around the point of shoulder to mediate all the friction.
3. “Tarp”: Non-stretchy and wraps around something such as the aponeurosis of the torso.
4. “Gel wrap”: A wrapping of jello-like consistency, its loose connective wrapping often serves as a heat sink.
5. Tensor Fascia Latae (TFL): It pops the patella off the “thumb stay” of the femur to release the Stay Apparatus to “take the patella off the hook." It also helps in lateral work by working as an abductor and a weak protractor and guards against locked stifles. Visually, it often manifests as an obvious strip from the point of hip to the stifle.

Clearly, there's much more to fascia than previously thought! Truly, it can be easily argued that fascia is as important as muscle and bone, tendon and ligament in the living animal, and so the same can be said for sculpture, too. For instance, it's often fascia that helps to give hide its various textures and character, whether at rest or in motion. Because if we pay close attention, we find that flesh has surface eccentricities we shouldn't be afraid to input as oddities in the surface of our sculptures, accentuating the appearance of living flesh. Again, ripples, bumps, stretches, wrinkles, crinkles, squiggles and other curiosities are typical of the equine hide, features that need our attention just as much as muscle and bone.

More still, paying attention to goo not only adds life to our sculpture, but it can heighten the sense of motion and moment as well. Truly, depicting skin that compresses, stretches, pooches, ripples, squiggles, jiggles, and wriggles can add kinetic features to our clay that can amplify the sense of effort, physics, centrifugal force, or speed. For example, carefully placing pooching goo in a composition can heighten the sense of moving flesh and mass, adding a sense of weight to our piece. Or for instance, adding strategic wrinkles to the hindquarter can heighten the sense of effort and motion in a trotting, cavorting, rearing, or racking piece, etc.

So What's The Hoopla With Goo? 

In a nutshell, goo adds life, or "living moment," back into our depiction of technical anatomy. Without it, structure remains mechanical, inert, and sterile; our piece will appear as a static, formulaic sculpture rather than as a living, kinetic, fleshy animal. Goo also accentuates everything else in a sculpture. For example, goo makes hard bony areas or firm muscle masses more believable because of the contrast it creates. Delicate wrinkles on a firm neck or mushy veins on hard bone really help to impart the idea of a living animal with real mass, living anatomy, and the moment's immediacy. Goo is also a blast to sculpt, with curves and gooshy features that allow an artist to play, providing a welcome contrast to the precise technical demands of realistic sculpture. And, ultimately, goo offers a deeper understanding of the structure and physics of the animal, beyond the strict mechanics of the anatomy, which can deepen our appreciation for our aesthetics and techniques, and even better, for the beauty of this lovely creature, too.

The truth is that anatomy is the blueprint—yes—but without imbued life, a sculpture is simply a representational, formulaic facsimile of that blueprint. This is fine unless we really want to capture that rare anima that brings our sculpture to life, that adds that living energy beyond simple representation. Because we must remember that every anatomical chart ever conceived was created from dead horses that probably had their goo removed so unless we compensate, our work based on those charts will be equally lifeless and incomplete. Part of that compensation is factoring in goo, that peculiar nature of flesh, to instill vitality back into our clay. Because if we step back and really think about it, we see that the living animal doesn't move like an articulated anatomy chart, like a jointed paper doll. This is because the animal's bony anatomy is encapsulated in goo which compresses and stretches, expands, pooches and mooshes, comes under tension or relaxes in tandem with articulation, emotion, and physics. Like just study how powerful inertia is on the rippling of muscles and flesh alone when the critter is really cavorting around!

So What Kinds Of Goo Are There?

What kinds of goo exist? Well, a lot! Wherever there’s something fleshy and mooshy, there’s goo. So to get your exploration started, look for these kinds of goo, for example:

• Wrinkles: These are folds of skin, either small and delicate or rather bulbous, in larger rolls. They can appear on the neck, throatlatch, between the ears, between the forelegs, on the pastern when flexed, in the elbow area, on the flanks, on the hindquarter or were the buttock meets the back of the gaskin when the hindleg is flexed or extended, on the barrel, and really everywhere compression, stretching, or bending happens. They're also common on the face, such as around the ears, the brows, lips, and muzzle, and that wonderful squishy chin. Studying the living animal and photos will reveal that wrinkles are very common and can appear in the most unexpected places. Because wrinkles are folds of skin, they can also be more substantial like those on the crest of a Welsh Cob stallion or Drafter, or sometimes on the torso if the horse is really bending around, perhaps to scratch an itch. And it doesn’t matter if a horse is wiry or pudgey, various types of wrinkles always occur, and so infusing them into our sculpture will do wonders for adding life's texture and moment.
• Squiggles: Textural goo can show up as crinkling or squiggles on the face, neck, chest, shoulder, tricep area, and sometimes the lower haunch, flank and elbow areas, so look for it in field study and in references.
• Strap marks: Sometimes on the barrel, longitudinal delineations can be seen so look for them in references and life study.
• Pock marking: The nostril flare surface texture can have pocked, pebbled appearance at times, especially if that area has been closely clipped or is in a slick summer coat.
• Depressions and concavities: Goo also manifests itself in the depressions and concavities muscle contours assume, especially when in motion, as the flesh is compressed, stretched, gooshed, pushed, pulled and pooched, forming dips and channels that don’t exist when the horse is simply standing. Remember, the horse is a 3D animal and so his muscles don’t simply move over each other, they also dip in and out and smoosh and shift around each other during contraction or relaxation, or in response to physics and motion. That is to say, muscles don’t only move back and forth and up and down, they also move in and out. This kind of goo does amazing things for sculpture by instilling a sense of mass and fleshiness, keeping it from becoming a “flattened” technical depiction of anatomy we see in a diagram. Truly, muscles aren't stiff, fixed masses, but kinetic and squishy, dynamic features, producing lovely surface contours as they react to each other, tension, and the physics of motion. 
• Sliding skin: The skin isn’t attached to the muscles or bone on the whole of its inner surface as though natured coated it with spray adhesive. Rather, skin is tacked down by fascia at random points, allowing the skin to slide over muscles or bony areas with relative ease. And the more mobile an area, the more likely the skin is slide-able over that area. For example, the skin on the elbow has a lot of sliding ability, which you can watch every time a horse lifts his foreleg. Also look for this effect on the ribs, stifle, and shoulder. Like watch how a horse flexes his hindleg and see how the stifle slides under the skin, or when a horse breaths deeply, how his ribs slide back and forth and out and in underneath the skin. 
• Amoeba: When studying motion, it’s important not to interpret the body as moving like a stick-figure or an articulated paper doll. Granted, movement occurs at the joints and those joints have parameters for articulation and the bones have their fixed dimensions, but within those parameters is life, the "living moment." That means it’s a mistake to think only of the skeleton and forget that its cloaked in flesh that smooshes, pooches, and stretches during articulation. This is the amoebic nature of flesh and understanding this concept is essential for "living realism." For example, notice how a deeply flexed hindleg will cause the gaskin to smoosh into the hindquarter musculature, with all sorts of wrinkles and gooshing? The skeleton does articulate, yes, but it doesn't do so in a vacuum! Always remember that it does so enveloped in glorious goo! Which leads to…
• Distortion: Because the skeleton is buried in flesh that morphs, when it articulates, muscle bellies are stretched, compressed, and pooched, distorting away from their normal appearance when standing. And the less an area is characterized by subcutaneous bone, the more this distortion can happen. Indeed, one of the most lovely and interesting aspects of sculpting movement is how the flesh changes in response. The neck, pectorals, shoulder, triceps, and hindquarter are typically the sites of the most distortion, so observe them on real horses to get a better understanding of just how much this effect comes into play when interpreting motion. But also study the barrel as the flesh there is highly responsive to moment and motion as well.
• Stretching: Flesh stretches and can often stretch a lot. Clear examples of this can be seen in the elbow and flank area as those little skin flaps that stretch when the limb is extended. Another clear example is the skin overlaying the girth and triceps area, which can be seen to stretch when that forearm really extends forwards. Also muscle bellies can be stretched during extension, which is easily observed around the shoulder and hinquarter when the respective legs are extended forwards or backwards, or in the pectoral area, when the forelegs are abducted, for instance.
• Compression: The opposite of stretching is compression, and flesh definitely undergoes that! For example, study neck goo when the neck is tucked as compared to stretched out, or the hindquarter muscles when the hindleg is greatly articulated in a bend as compared to being extended out. And where you find compression, you usually find wrinkles of some kind, and especially pooching and distorted flesh, so pay attention to that in your life study and references.
• Muscle resonance: This sublime manifestation of goo occurs when inertia acts upon relaxed portions of flesh, making them jiggle and wiggle, flop or ripple in resonance to the physics of movement. For instance, look for a bowed posterior portion of the forearm on an extended foreleg because the flexor muscles are relaxed, or how the triceps goo and hollow and ripple when relaxed, or the sternomandibularis muscles jiggling, rippling, or bowed due to the inertia of a sharp turn or spin, or how a hefty crest can wobble or jiggle with the physics of motion or the pull of the mane's weight. Our eye often misses these moments, but when our Eye is honed, we'll be able to observe such effects in living horses and then in photos. They add a wonderful touch to sculpture!

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Tips For Infusing The Goo Factor

Ok, so now that we know about goo, let's get it into our clay. To that end, here are some tips: 

• We should know our anatomy. Goo can distort or hide anatomical structures, so if we’re going to learn about goo, we have to first know about anatomy first otherwise we'll get confused. We have to learn the rules before we can tweak them!
• Life study is a must. We cannot learn about goo by simply studying photos or anatomical diagrams. We have to study the living animal and spend a lot of focused time observing how living flesh behaves and feels. 
• Don’t overdo. The sculpture will look odd if we make the effects too extreme by getting carried away and therefore making your hard bone or cartilage even appear gooey, for example. The trick is to find an interpretation that gets the point across that’s both technically accurate and artistically pleasing. 
• Know your goo. Work to identify the different types of goo and under what circumstances they appear. For example, wrinkles are always present in one place or another while amebic goo mostly occurs around areas of flexion or extension. Also, several types of goo may happen simultaneously, such as wrinkle with concavities and distortions so also pay attention to cumulative effects. 
• Remember what goo is. Always keep in mind that goo is pliable flesh that squishy, soft, and warm. It’s seductive and alluring and begs to be touched. So we need to keep the goo in our sculpture fleshy and soft looking, avoiding methods that would make it appear harsh, sharp, regimented, or mechanical. That's to say our goo shouldn't look like joint wrinkles on an artificial limb, for instance. In other words, wrinkles shouldn't be regimented or have "plateau tops" because they were just cut in, but have rounded tops and squishy asymmetries in their formation.
• Preplan your goo. Because goo is an integral part of our finished sculpture, it’s important to consider how it’s applied. For example, large bundles of rippling, delineated muscle on a Quarter Horse are fun, but aren't always accurate on a smooth-bodied Arabian. Jiggling muscles on a standing sculpture will look strange as would static goo on a moving sculpture. So identify the appropriate types of goo and the necessary degree needed for it to complement our sculpture while still conveying reality. 
• Think in terms of curves. Lean away from straight lines and straight planes when sculpting muscle masses. Horses are made of flesh, not polished sheet metal.
• Details count. Veins, whisker bumps/moles, bumps, bug bites, and pebbly or squiggly hide textures contribute to the illusion of fleshiness, so instill them when appropriate.
• Notice how goo stacks on top of each other sometimes. Like veins can run across areas of squiggly texture or some wrinkles can have bug bites on them.
• Goo has a cumulative effect as the addition of each new type of goo adds more complexity and realism to a piece. So don't rely on just one type of goo to carry the sculpture. Look for and infuse as much as you can into the piece as suggested by life study and your references.
• Tackle goo in stages. In other words, you don't have to infuse it all in at once. Think about what can be done in a more controlled sequence for the best results. For instance, perhaps wrinkling and pock marking can be done alongside the sculpting stages while veining and whisker bumps can be completed as a last stage on the hard copy of a sculpture.
• Note how some goo is really obvious like wrinkling or dipped or pooching contours while other goo is more subtle like crinkling and squiggling. So "adjust the volume" on your goo for the most realistic result.
• Study other artists. Taking note on how other artists sculpturally express goo will help us decide how we wish to approach it in our work. 
• Study horses in short summer coats or clipped coats for a better idea of all the kinds of goo you'll encounter. And be sure to study goo on the different ages and breeds, too, as they can influence the nature of goo. For instance, a thin-skinned Teke will often exhibit a lot more skin goo factors than a "thicker skinned" draft horse, or foals can have a lot deeper depressions in their muscle masses when they move because they lack obscuring fat.

Because of its fleshiness, sculpting goo can be tricky. So for a head start, avoid these common missteps:

• Wrinkle bundling: Characterized by a discreet bundle of tidy wrinkles, tightly amassed around an articulated area and possessing a definite border between the wrinkles and the surrounding unwrinkled flesh. In reality, wrinkles fade in and out and often blend gently with the surrounding flesh with no real border; it’s often very chaotic, messy, and gradual. 
• "Topped" or "plateau" wrinkles: When the tops of the wrinkles aren't rounded, but flattened because they were quickly cut into the surface without the edges being knocked down, rounded, and smoothed.
• Accordion wrinkles: When the wrinkling is too regimented when in reality, wrinkles often vary in thickness, length, and orientation, and can fold within each other or stack on top of each other, creating asymmetries in the wrinkle pattern. So each wrinkle shouldn't be the same size or width nor should they be evenly spaced and regimented. In life, wrinkles are much more chaotic. Remember, a wrinkle is a bit of folded, soft flesh, and so our sculpted hide shouldn't behave like a segmented accordion. Always work from references when sculpting them.
• Slashing: Again, a wrinkle is folded flesh, so we should try to avoid tooling that causes a slashed, harsh, sharp, topped, or grooved look. Keep them rounded, soft, and squishy looking.
• Channeling: Muscle masses are rounded and curved, and so the defining grooves between them are often softer and more mercurial than anatomy charts depict. So we should avoid tooling that creates a harshly carved groove into the clay to denote muscle definition, with sharp edges and lacking that rounded, amoebic, softened nature of living muscle masses. 
• Excess: So much about recreating convincing goo is knowing when to apply it and when not to, and in which areas and why, and in what varied intensity best gets the point across. If we don't apply goo, our sculpture will appear too static whereas if we apply too much, it'll appear lumpy and odd. Goo is a very powerful element to our sculpture so be clear and strategic when applying it.
• Too Harsh: The thing about goo is this—it's softened and usually subdued (with the exception of wrinkles). So lean into subtlety rather than sculpting goo too obviously and in too amplified a manner across the board. 
• Incorrect planing, proportions, or placement: No amount of well sculpted goo can compensate for errors in structure. So before you apply goo or texture, be sure your underlying anatomy and biomechanics are correct.

Methods For Sculpting Goo

There are certain tricks we can apply to our clay to help the goo sculpting fun along. Here are some techniques to get you started:

• When sculpting wrinkles, lay down a sheet of thickish plastic (like the clear plastic on bread packaging) onto your clay and sculpt the wrinkles on top of that, pushing the plastic sheet into the clay. The plastic sheet will round the tops of the wrinkles for you and result in a nice fleshy look. Then gently peel it up, clean up and detail out a little bit, and voilá! (If sculpting in epoxy clay, use plastic wrap instead, or some sort of thinner plastic because epoxy clay is often softer than oil clay or ceramic clay.)
• You can sculpt wrinkles in by adding tiny, skinny snakes and then softening and blending with solvents and brushes. Which brings us to...
• Use a smoothing solvent and soft brushes (in rounds and filberts) to smooth gooey areas to preserve their soft, fleshy look. For ceramic clay, use clean water. For oil clay, use turpenol: 60% turpenoid and 40% 91% rubbing alcohol. For epoxy clay, use 91% rubbing alcohol.
• To create the crinkly texture on the neck, shoulders, triceps and sometimes on the lower haunch, use your sculpting tool to squish in networks of little Figure-8s and tiny circles and squiggles, then gently smooth and melt them into the surface with your solvent and brushes. You can leave strategic bumps, too, to add to the textural interest.
• To create veins, use messo and a skinny round brush with long bristles. Messo is a mixture of 60% Modeling Paste (Liquitex works well) and 40% gesso (Liquitex gesso works well), thinned with water to the consistency of milk and "beaded" on with the brush. That's to say, draw your vein on with a tip held perpendicular to the surface to create an elongated beading of messo.
• When the messo is the consistency of heavy cream, you can dab on tiny whisker bumps with this stuff, too. (When it's unthinned with water, you can use it to dab on and texturize chestnuts and ergots.)
• Don't be so eager to "outline" muscles to delineate them. Instead, hint at their outlines when you can with strategic dips and concavities rather than with grooves.
• To create neck texture, slide your sculpting tool side to side from crest to the underline to create randomized small squiggly ridges and subtle squiggly grooves, then melt and smooth them a bit with your solvent and brushes to quiet them. You can even go back in with messo on the hard copy master to add more details like bumps and amplified ridges and ripples.
• Study how wrinkling manifests on the brows, lips, muzzle, and between the nostrils, and try to input that—in scale—on your sculpture, using your solvent and brushes to smooth and soften.
• Try different tools for creating wrinkles. Often something as simple as a pointed toothpick or a sharpened pencil works well, but small blade tools are also handy.
• When sculpting wrinkles in epoxy clay, soften and goo-ify the clay by mixing in some 91% rubbing alcohol and kneading it in, creating more of a doughier, stickier texture. Then use this softened epoxy clay to sculpt in the wrinkles. Why? Because this softened epoxy clay is less prone to tear or pill when you sculpt in the wrinkles. So to do that, place a little blob of this softened epoxy clay in the area you wish then blend the edges into the surrounding areas. Then take your tool and carefully cut in your wrinkles, more concerned about not tearing them up as you sculpt them. Dip you tool into more 91% rubbing alcohol often to lubricate the process. Then when you have your wrinkles configured how you want them, use brushes and the rubbing alcohol to smooth and soften them. Then as the epoxy starts to stiffen in its cure, you can strategically define and deepen them as you wish.
• When sculpting in pock marks or puckering, such as on the muzzle or nostril area, poke in a multitude of gentle bumps with a pointed sculpting tool like a sharpened pencil then soften by gently stipling the area with a brush dampened slightly in solvent.
• Sculpting texture into your smooth surfaces can seem very uncomfortable at first, but persist! What you're working against is the "blank canvas" effect where you don't want to mar your perfect surface. However, the more textural touches you add, the more natural and living your fleshy surfaces will appear, so keep at it.

How To Study Goo

It's important to understand that goo isn't the same over the entire body. Different areas have different kinds of goo, or textures, at different intensities. For instance, the goo on the muzzle is fleshy and velvety as compared to the goo in the elbow area which is very squishy, smooshy, and silken. Or the goo textures on the neck can be a little bit different from that on the triceps area, the former often having more of a bumpy, ridged look while the latter usually has more of a squiggly, pebbly finish. Also look for different sizes of wrinkles over different areas on the body. For instance, the wrinkles at that throatlatch can be larger than those around the ear. But also note that wrinkles even with a "bundle" vary in size and length, too, so avoid regimentation like an accordion. Mix them up and vary them for a more natural, fleshy look.

Field study is ideal for studying goo! So get out there and study the living animal up close. For example, watching horses in turn-out or on the lunge-line is a good start by creating a focused situation. Pay particular close attention to the shoulders, throatlatch, forearms, elbow area, hindquarter, neck, ears, lips, chest, genitals, crest, and barrel. Look for the compressions, stretching, pooching, dips, wrinkling, wiggling, jiggling, rippling movement with each stride and phase of movement on the horse’s body. Slow motion video is also a great way to study how goo resonates with motion, how it morphs and distorts, ripples and jiggles in synch with the motion, emotion, force, and the moment of the horse’s movement.

Now if you can and the horse is willing, feel the goo with your hands, over various parts of the body. Like feel the different textures and firmness levels then gently press in the musculature to get a sense of standing muscle tonus and feel it tense up or relax as the horse shifts their balance or moves. Programming the textural gooey qualities and differences into our hands is a highly effective means to learn them.

Then when that's under your belt, turnaround and attempt to decipher and identify goo in photos. This type of training can train us about goo very quickly, better enabling us to imbue it into our clay. In fact, we’ll discover that goo is a whole new level of understanding that deepens our appreciation of equine anatomy and lends interest and life to our sculpture in ways otherwise unattainable.

Play around with your sculpting materials and tools. Practice at sculpting wrinkles, for example, on junker models to perfect their qualities. Learn to use your tools in new ways to create the dips and distortions so typical of activated flesh. Hone your Eye to break your own safe formulas and habits in order to decipher and depict morphing flesh more authentically. And trust the process! Sometimes infusing goo can feel odd when sculpting because it's so distorted from the safe formulas of an anatomy chart or our habitual ways of depicting musculature, but dive in all the same and trust that it'll make sense in the end. The fact is that reality can look odd, but that oddness is intrinsic to the "living moment," of life itself, and that can be just the touch of unapologetic factuality our sculpture needs.

Conclusion

Anyone can apply anatomical charts and diagrams to copy the anatomy faithfully into sculpture. That's relatively easily done with a bit of discipline and gumption. But it takes a new kind of understanding to mimic the life of that anatomy to capture and reinstate the nature of living flesh. Indeed, an anatomy chart is one thing, but living flesh is entirely another. If we want to kick our work up a notch in the realism department then, we need to know the difference.

And it's the understanding of goo that helps us transcend the inert lifelessness of a literal technical interpretation by adding character, moment, and life to that anatomical base. It brings the "living moment" back into the equation to communicate the mass, anima, moment, and movement of the animal in ways a strict technical expression will fail to convey. In doing so, we've gone one step closer to capturing living reality in our clay, expressing this lovely animal more completely and faithfully. So, until next time, have fun fleshing out goo in your clay!

"I search for the realness, the real feeling of a subject, all the texture around it...I always want to see the third dimension of something...I want to come alive with the object."

—Andrew Wyeth

The Gooier Factor