I've gotten more interested in traditional sculpture lately. My MFA thesis is focused on the digital side of sculptural anatomy, but I find that traditional and digital media complement each other well. Johnny's brother-in-law gave him some decent-quality air-dry clay for Christmas a year so back; I decided to give it a whirl for a few studies.
First off, I needed a good sculpture stand and the retail options are just too expensive! Taking some scrap material I had floating around I built the base structure in birch plywood around a common turnbuckle hardware structure that gives me the ability to just feed in new armature rod at will:
The basic armatures for these studies are just 3/8" standard eye bolts from the hardware store like the ones on the left. These are cheap, between $1 and $2 depending on the length, and wrapped with a little armature wire they function perfectly for the head studies I've been doing. They simply thread into the turnbuckle rod base and being threaded, they rotate for easy work angle adjustment or lock in place with half turn of the nut.
I hammered some nuts into a scrap piece of wood (towards the back) to make a quick drying / display rack.