The First thing I did was choose a subject for my sculpture. The main protagonist in Furry Experience is: Catherine "Cat" Feline. She is a grey anthropomorphic house-cat who also is a college student majoring in Art.

A few of the panels of her in her figure drawing class gave me the perfect setting in which to bring the sculpture to life. Here is the Comic Page I got the idea from. (It might not make sense unless you go back a bit and read the start of the story arc.)

After choosing the character, and the backdrop, next I decided to work on the scale of the piece. The props for the build actually helped in achieving a proper scale down of the whole model. I started by doing research on the "Art Horse" that Cat sits on in her class. Using graph paper, and some online plans to find the dimensions of the horse. from there I drew out an actual size diagram. The wood I used for the art horse was made from an 88 cent yard stick from a hardware store. using the grid paper you can see that one quarter inch square equals two inches.

since the width of the seat is 12" inches I used a bit of math to deduce that the scale would be 1/8th the size of a real art horse. Then as you can see in the second picture I sketched out an actual sized picture of how the sculpture would fit on the horse. (I also was playing around with the sculpey clay, and made an arm to get a feel for it again. I haven't made one of these pieces for a few years.)

Once you have a more than vague idea about your piece you should be ready to grab your materials and get to sculpting!