Episode 59: A Special, Epic Installment: Perspectives on Digital Sculpting vs. Toothpick & Putty

Above: A screenshot by Barry of him mucking about on Zbrush. Below: putty and toothpick on Jim’s workbench.

With our last episode recapping MFCA 2025, your hosts—with help from Lou Masses and Dennis Levy—kicked up a bit of a hornet’s nest by addressing a major recurring topic of discussion at the show and in our small section of the miniatures world in general: Should digital sculpting and 3D printing be judged differently than the “handmade/toothpick and putty” sculpts that have predominated in this odd art form of ours for the last five and a half decades?

Okay, it was mainly Jim doing the kicking. But since he was in part recounting a long and thoughtful conversation in Pennsylvania with master-sculptor Alan Ball, first featured with his master-painter wife Marion on Episode 20 of our podcast, we invited Alan to come back to have the discussion in real time—“for the record,” so to speak, and sans paraphrasing. As always, he graciously and eloquently shared his thoughts and insights as one of the deepest thinkers about this passion we share.

Above: Alan at home in Switzerland via Zoom. Visit his and Marion’s Web site here and see images of the work we highlighted on our blog here while talking about some of our favorites among their many excellent pieces.

Now, when anyone talks about digital sculpting in the historical as opposed to the fantasy category of miniature figures today, the name Nello Rivieccio inevitably comes up. Based near Naples, he is as much of a master on Zbrush as he was for many years with a toothpick (or similar tool) and two-part epoxy putty.

We have been wanting to interview Nello for some time, since we are major fans of his work; since he’s such a gregarious fellow, and since he’s had an absolutely fascinating life. After making a name as a master miniaturist and jazz drummer, he took a decade-long sabbatical to travel the globe as a chef cooking on luxury yachts, then returned to learn Zbrush and begin sharing his 3D prints with painters and collectors here and via the successful Kickstarter he launched for his recent Marina Project.

To be clear, we do not intend these dual chats as a Pro/Con, Point/Counterpoint pairing: Alan and Nello have as many areas of agreement with each other (and with your hosts) as they do differences. But since the conversation about the advent of digital sculpting is certain to be a major topic of conversation again at World Model Expo, we wanted to drop this epic episode with both of them at the same time, so folks can have their perspectives (and our own) in mind as they view the work on display in Versailles from July 4 to 6.

Because Barry will more than have his hands full helping with the second Rocky Mountain Hobby Expo on June 20 and 21 and finishing a new box diorama to bring to WME—while Jim will be sitting at home miserably stewing about missing both—we’ll take a break before we drop another episode, some time after those two great events, when our heads have cleared and we can do our show reports justice.

Meanwhile, we leave you, dear listener and reader, to continue pondering what digital sculpting, 3D printing, and (gulp!) Artificial Intelligence mean to miniatures and modeling. (“Big ideas” about both, is, after all, our tag line.)

Below: Nello’s 3D printers as seen on Zoom—he refers to them during our chat as “the three bad sisters”; the toothpick-and-putty figure in Jim’s collection, which he was surprised to learn dates from Nello’s first or second year of selling his work to collectors during round one, and some examples of his recent digital work.