Can't get enough Mastodon? The more the Merrier!

Happy Holidays!  I hope everyone got what they wanted, or found the things they wanted to get for others! :-)

More pctures of the Mastodon.  This time, some of the crew!

The face painted... no more pink horns!

Mastodon on the March!

Some scouts flanking the Big Guy!

Santa driving his sleigh?

More face...

And another scout!

How many toys can you fit inside the howdah?

Lots of room for passengers too!

Once again, many thanks to all the loyal Wappellians who help keep the blog rolling!  By the beginning of January, it will be 10 months since the start, and it will be close to 500,000 page views!  Pat yourselves on the back!

Best wishes for the Holidays.

The first images of the painted Mastodon

Well, Merry Christmas!  Happy Holidays to one and all!

On this busy day for everyone, I have a little something for you to look at.  Here we have a variety of long distance shots of the painted Mastodon.  For those who did not see the work in progress images, I suggest that you check out those posts from a few days ago.

These long shots give you a pretty good sense of the scale of this piece.

The wooden plaque was pretty huge, and this beast took up a fair chunk of that space. :-)

Well, I hope that Santa brings everybody of very cool stuff!  Take care, and many thanks for helping me to make this blog such a wonderful addition to my own life in 2012!!!

Home for the Holidays

Actually, this is the first time in a while that we are here in Chicago for the Holidays!

I tried to find something from the archives that has not been posted, but had red and green.  This one seemed to do the trick!  One of the old metal Tech Marines.

Not terribly easy to paint, that's for sure.

Lots of fun little effects, though!

Anyway, wishing you all a Merry Christmas Eve!!!

Only a few more left!!!

It's the wee hours of Christmas eve, so one more post for me... adding to the Empire handgunner unit!

You can see that we are almost there!!!

Once the last two "Ghost gunner" are painted, I will look over the whole unit and do a few extra touches here and there.

Close ups of the Celtos mastodon

As the Holidays draw ever closer, we have some close ups of the Mastodon, as promised!

First, however, we have that artwork I told you about.  There were numerous drawings such as this in the rule books of creatures and chariots, etc., which I thought were fantastic.

So, I set about making this drawing come to life.

I won't repeat my descriptions about all the various types of sculpey used from yesterday's post, so I will mostly let you check out the images unabated by my senseless banter!

Some close ups of the howdah, and the figures inside...

The driver...

Ain't this a pretty face?

The driver again.

I am really hoping that the kickstarter reaches its initial goals, since one of the 'down the road' stretch goal DVD's I'd like to make involve sculpting big monsters from scratch like this.  I don't get many opportunities to sculpt things from scratch, and monsters are something I absolutely love to do!!!  It is so much fun.

Aldon Oathkeeper, Dwarf Paladin from Stonehaven Miniatures

On this Christmas Eve eve, we have another member of the Stonehaven Dwarf Kickstarter.  This time, it is Aldon Oathkeeper.  When danger is afoot, Aldon takes the lead, going to great lengths to protect his companions.

And here is someone who goes to great lengths to protect his precious cookies.  Master of the Cookieverse... BABO!

Scratch sculpted Mastadon for Celtos

Still in the archives during this very busy time.  Did more research on the Kickstarter front, and made some more progress for the proposal.  In the meantime, here is something I did back in 2006.

I always liked the Celtos miniature line, and in one of the original rulebooks they had a wonderful drawing of this mastodon (I'll try to include that in the next post), and it made me really want to sculpt it!  This was the summer after I sculpted Grond, so doing large scale critters was not entirely new.

I started out with my tin foil armature, which was then surrounded by the white regular sculpey.  That was baked to keep the pose stable enough for subsequent layers to be added.

In fact, these WIP images are conveniently color coded!  The white sculpey is the regular variety, which you see me using for bases all the time.  The pinkish-orange sculpey is super sculpey, while the neon pink sculpey is sculpey III.  Each type has its own properties.

The Super Sculpey has more strength and resilience, while the Neon sculpey is the strongest of the three, but also the most difficult to shape.  You can see that the most potentially fragile parts were made from the toughest sculpey.

It is possible to bake sculpey multiple times, but you have to be careful not to scorch your original layers.  Of course, I decided to attempt this piece in the dead of summer, during a massive heat wave.  Bad idea, since it got mighty hot in the house!

This was long before I knew about Apoxy Sculpt.  If I were to try this again, I would definitely use the non baking material. :-)  For those of you who are newer to the blog, you can see some of my sculpted monsters in my Lizardman and Tomb King armies.  Use the search function on the left hand column to find those, or look through the Lizardman/Tomb Kings threads.

I have some more close up shots of this mastodon that are coming tomorrow.  You will get a better glimpse at the howdah, and the armor.  The figures on the howdah are Celtos figures, some of which were modified to work with the howdah, such as the driver.