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Made my first attempt and sculpting beards and long hair tonight. I used both Milliput Superfine White, and Greenstuff, as well as a mix of the two. Pure Milliput was a disaster, and will require a decapitation to clean up. Best success was with pure Greenstuff, but it didn't come out as I'd hoped. I theorize that it's better to have a bit more yellow than blue in this case. I plan to give that a go, am I going the right way? The mix was interesting, and I think maybe an 80/20 GS to Milliput mix might be ok, rather than the roughly 60/40 I used. Maybe another type of Milliput? I've read a gajillion tutorials on it, (especially FTW's article, many times) can anyone give me any extra advice, general tips, or tips for either material?

The main thing you have to remember with GS is that it's slightly elastic; it will want to go back to its starting position after you move it around. The level of elasticity changes as the putty cures, I find the key is to get the rough shapes down right away, then leave it for a good ten or fifteen minutes before I go back to it and get the main shapes in place. After that it's a matter of going back to it every ten minutes or so and refining your work until you're happy with it or the putty cures and you have to tear it off and begin again, heh.

Now, there's nothing wrong with GS, and you can probably achieve something similar using the 80/20 mix of GS/Milliput you mentioned(is it Superfine White you have?), but I do most of my sculpting using ProCreate now - it's slightly more expensive than the bulk-buy GS you can find on ebay, but it's far easier to work with IMO.

I haven't sculpted much hair but what i did was always with pure GS. I don't know what hairstyle you want to create but most hairstyles look best with a more organic flow with strands beeing not all parallel. Just add a strand here or there that breaks with the flow or overlaps another strand.

In my most recent hair i used just normal GS. I flatened out the the hair cut the strands in with a hobby knife and used a sharp tipped clay shaper to go over each cut again.
You can see a bit of that on those:


As for the mix only add milliput if you want very sharp picked out strands. But hair doesn't need to be perfectly sharp. Even GW doesn't pick out too much details on hair.


And have you tried out using just milliput standard with GS like i do? I like it more than mixing with milliput white. It is cheaper and it feels more flexible. (But maybe my white was an old batch )

My understanding of materials is to use milliput for harder objects where you need nice crisp edges and GS for more organic stuff. On that basis pure GS is the right material for hair. I agree with doomhammer for the limited times I've done hair.

I agree, pure GS was easier to work with. I'm just going for long hair, nothing fancy stylistically. It came out rougher than I'd wanted but I think with more yellow than blue it won't be as sticky and thus stay a bit smoother.