FOs: Meabh and Solkist

Two new finished objects to post today.  Well... actually they've been done for a little while but I only got around to taking pictures today.

Meabh

Meabh was my first mini that I built a skeleton for from a wire frame to build the clay onto.

You can see all my finger prints and the dust and everything!  Okay, so stuff I didn't do in this one:  Hadn't started using the baking stuff more than once thing - and it could have used it.  A bunch of places I'd have made, and then mess up while I was working on other things.  The character is meant to be draped in a silver chain and carry the blade of a legendary sword.  You can see her legs especially are a bit messed up.  However, she is a step up, I feel, from the awkward postures of the goblins from my last post.  I was really proud at the time of the chain, and the cloak, especially the gathering at the hood.

And here's the back of the cloak and her hair.  Very flat hair, I don't think I'll do hair that way again... it looks pretty much like what I did, which was cut it from a rolled out sheet of clay and stick it to her head.  I am pretty happy with her face though, especially in this side shot.

Solkist

Sol was made for a friend, whose request was 'an elf wizard with safety orange robes'.  He's made with a wire frame, and I did it him in two baking steps.  The orb on the end of his staff glows in the dark.

The first step I made the head/ears and the torso (the white undershirt) onto the wire frame for the wizard.  This let me not worry about messing up his face/ears while I was making the rest of him, and already having a bit of bulk to build onto for the torso helped too, and held the wire frame together.

I'm really happy with how his hair turned out, even if it would look completely ridiculous on a real person.  The bow is pretty nice.   Actually I'm pretty happy with how he turned out, period.  I did a lot better at not getting fingerprints all over him, too.

Lessons to carry on and ideas for future projects:

• Doing the wire frame to build things on works pretty well, but it works even better done in multiple steps.
• I've been having droopy/curving weapons a lot lately.  So I think in the future I'll either bake them separately, or support them with their own wire piece like Sol's staff.
• I need to watch more carefully the sorts of impressions I'm leaving on the clay.  Could I do this on purpose, maybe get some fabric to press on the clay and give it a 'woven' texture?
• Hair is not a flat sheet.  It doesn't look okay to make it like a piece of fabric.
• Learn how to stage photos a bit better.
• The better the picture in my head is starting out, the better the mini turns out.  Going to do more detailed sketches before starting minis in the future.

Something Old Sunday: The Legion of goblins.

Yeaah, I know, I know, but it's Sunday somewhere right?

It's... not?

Oh.  Well, I'm sure if we got the Tardis involved, it *could* be.

Got eaten by school.  It happens from time to time.  So, I didn't want to not post *anything* so I'm just going to put up a few pictures, and I'll come back and talk about them later.

So there are four goblins, two with swords, one with a dagger, and one with a shortbow/quiver.  I meant to add arrows later but never did.  They don't have names!  Hmm... I need a set of four names... all I can think of is Leo, Donnie, Raph, and Mikey.  But these goblins are not nearly cool enough for that.

Here they are, there are five individual shots because I took a behind shot of the archer to show the quiver:

And as a group:

Yeah I probably didn't need the flash on for that one.

You can see that these were made before I started using proper wire frames for things.  They've got an ogre buddy who's even the worse for wear, but he'll come in another post.  You can see I was having a bit of fun experimenting with different face types I could get made.  They're also not painted.  Nothing is!  Some day I am going to have a big painting day, but it has not come.

~Kerry

Something Old Sunday #1: My first Sculpey Miniature

So, to start off, my MacBook's harddrive crashed. It's under warranty so they'll replace it and everything, but I'm currently waiting on it to respawn.

I thought instead of posting a whole slew of random pictures that I wouldn't have time to comment on properly all at once, I'd post only a few at a time. That also gives me time to find or take pictures of things...!

Alright, so today we have my very first miniature ever.

Isn't he cute. I had even less of an idea of what I was doing than I do now, which is saying something, but he's still one of the ones I get the most compliments on if I show people a group of minis. He was relatively simple - I made a head and a cylinder (slightly squashed) for the body. Originally I had been thinking I would have him raising two arms above his head as if calling some force down from another plane. Honestly, after I made the first arm, I couldn't make a second one to match closely enough. So when I made the cloak I formed it to suggest a second (nonexistant) arm underneath.

I do like him, though. There's always the shady guy in the huge black cloak, and he does look pretty at home on the map.





Issues and lessons:

• If you're going to have to make more than one of something, do them all at the same time in stages after carefully making sure you have the same amount of clay for each. Arms, legs, ears, anything.
• The clasp on the guy's cloak is almost the same size as his head. I've decided it's some sort of creepy thing carved from bone, but really I just fumbled that one a bit. Oops. :(

What I should have learned but still messed up on in later projects:

• "Eyeing it" doesn't work very well when you're working with such small sizes. I'm still not great at keeping my minis in appropriate scale to one another, but yesterday I made an unfortunate error in sizing within one miniature because I didn't compare what I was working on to the minature it was going to go with. Pictures will be included when I post that project.

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.