WIP: Beholder

Okay, so lately I've been playing around trying my hand at making miniatures for Dungeons and Dragons.  The scale is meant to be around 5 feet to 1 inch or so.  Not that I'm at a point where I'm very accurate about that.

Anyway, so here's my latest project so far:  The Beholder.  Anybody who's ever played d&d will have heard of this little many-eyed beastie.

The base is a 2" washer (or a washer around about 2" in diameter anyway) to give you an idea for scale.  Done in Sculpey clay and "floating" on some heavier gauge beading wire.  I had this realization that I could bake sculpey more than once (though you only get to mold it before the first time you bake it) so I can make part of something, bake it to let it keep its shape, then add more clay and sculpt that, and bake it all again.  This is my first experiment with that - I made the green eyes first, just rolled the clay into balls and baked them.  Then, when I was making the  body of the monster I was able to set in the eyes without worrying about deforming them.

So, the sculpting part of the miniature is done, except I'm thinking now I might add some clay to the base and bake it again, just to pretty it up a bit.

How do I feel about how well it's turning out?

• the baking the clay more than once thing is pretty awesome, I've already got a few ideas for things to do with that for future minis!
  
• I think if I could do this again I'd use a wire base for the tentacles.  They turned out fine, but they did droop a bit while baking, and one pulled away from the body a tad too much for me to be happy with.
• He turned out awfully cheery-looking.  I guess he's pretty exited to eat some PCs.

What's left?

• painting on some pupils
• adding something over the washer for a nicer base

I am working on a few other things right now but I want to wait until I have some good pictures to talk about them.  Also, I think I'll start getting up some old projects this weekend.