Saturday, June 13, 2015

Hoof and axe


Today we have the beastman champion from Mierce Miniatures.


It was fun getting to paint mass amounts of blood effects on the weapons of this group!


Three down, seven to go!


A surprise in every corner


While I do remember starting this sculpt years ago, I quite literally bumped into it the other day when I was looking for something else!


I never finished it, but it probably had as much to do with lack of a finishing material, such as Apoxy Sculpt.  What you see in these images is a number of layers of sculpey over an armature.


I would approach this very differently now.  It would have been made mostly of tin foil as a solid armature, and wrapped in thinner layers of Apoxy Sculpt.  This would certainly have kept the weight down!


As it is, this is pretty heavy.  You can see that the back of this piece still has a number of layers to go.

Sculpey can be baked multiple times, as long as you are careful about it.


I was going to sculpt some fairy wings on the back of it, but I may or may not follow up on that.  Perhaps I could even make them out of a transparent material, as I won't be baking this any more.

Whatever additional sculpting to be done will be completed with Apoxy Sculpt and green stuff.


I will also be adding a lot of intertwining vines around the tree branches.


You will get a kick out of this... until I started taking pictures of these angles, I didn't even realize I had sculpted a face into the tree!

My guess is that I stopped working on this over ten years ago, so I think I can be excused for the memory lapse. :-)


The Apoxy Sculpt is a great material on larger scale pieces like this, since it is very easy to smooth it out by adding water to your finger or sculpting tool.  This breaks down the top layers a bit, and the surface becomes like a liquid.

So, it ends up with a very thin layer of 'slime', which dries very smooth.


It's also very strong, and it will lend additional strength and support to the sculpey sections.


I have a lot more experience sculpting smaller details now, so, I am looking forward to completing this at some point!


I have some of the "color shaper" tools which I tested last summer at Convergence.  Those will be very handy!!


I will be sculpting a lot of filligre on the dress and other areas, adding jewelry and possibly some leaf patterns.


The DVD gives you a sense of how large this is.


I will be sure to take lots of images of this when I do finally get around to completing it!

Stay tuned...