The Concept

With the basic idea of an Ancestral Guardian Battle Engine nailed down, I needed to decide how exactly I was going to approach it. I didn’t want to simply make a taller version of the models we already had; instead, I wanted to come up with a unique fluff background for this model which would result in an equally unique visual design.

I started my research by digging up all of the Ancestral Guardian art I could find, as well as some general art of Skorne armor. There are quite a few Ancestral Guardian pieces spanning a decade of Privateer publications, from the black-and-white illustrations in the old IKRPG books to the full-colour paintings in recent Mk.II publications. All feature a black stone statue carved in the image of an armor-clad warrior with a semi-abstract, idealized Skorne face. The figures wield a variety of weapons (though leaning heavily toward polearms and spears of various sorts), but all share common design elements in their gold filigree and gem-studded armour.

Looking over my research, I started putting together a concept. I knew I was building a battle engine, so my scale was essentially set for me– roughly the height of a Wraith Engine, with enough side-to-side sprawl to cover a good portion of a 120mm base.The obvious fluff justification for a Guardian that tall was to stand watch over an important landmark, like these fellas:

However, I worried that a basic “dude with weapon” design wouldn’t fill enough of the base, even if I put it in a dynamic pose (which wouldn’t make much sense on such a stiff character, anyway). I toyed with the idea of a “stockier” character in the style of a Wold Guardian, but this felt totally wrong for the lithe Skorne. However, after some idle sketching, I eventually hit on an amusing idea:

MOAR ARMS!

A Guardian with two arms would struggle to occupy space, but a model with four of them, each holding a long weapon, could easily be made to fill the available volume. Once I started sketching the arms, my mind started filling in the fluff gaps: wouldn’t a highly-trained Skorne warrior find the excess arms clumsy and disorienting? If so, why not say that a construct of this size is powered by multiple enshrined souls, who work together to operate their shared body, Jaeger-style*?

*And I totally didn’t steal the idea– I started working on this six months before that movie came out! 😛

With that conceit in place, other interesting ideas soon flooded in. How would multiple souls get along inside that confined area? Would they each retain their identities, or would they fuse into one compound mind?

Would they be aware of each other? Would they communicate?

This last item was particularly intriguing to me– putting your House’s greatest fighters into immortal warrior bodies is pretty handy, but while you’re retaining the ancestor’s fighting prowess, you lose its irreplaceable experience and wisdom. So, what if these larger bodies were used to collect a different sort of honored ancestor– not necessarily the finest warriors (though being high-ranking Skorne, they would certainly be that as well), but the greatest minds? The generals, the diplomats, the historians; and yes, the plotters and schemers. Anyone whose value lies not necessarily in their ability to swing a sword, but in the knowledge they took to the grave. By enshrining them in a shared body, they would allow these thinkers to converse and discuss in perpetuity, speaking their consensus decisions through loyal Extollers.

This would give a tremendous advantage to your House, allowing you to consult with the greatest minds of the last millennium for assistance with military strategy or political maneuvering.

I decided that each body would contain three souls; each remains distinct from the others, but they learn to work in concert to pilot their reborn form. To keep their descendants from forgetting their plural status, the statue would be carved not with one face, but with three; the eyes gazing outward in constant vigilance, the features carved to vaguely mimic the mind within.

I gave this construct a name to reflect its function: the Dynastic Council. Because while it is certainly capable of sowing destruction on the battlefield when its house requires, the true purpose of the construct is always one of counsel and instruction.

It took me about a week to advance the sketches and fluff to a level I was happy with; both still needed some work, but the broad strokes were there, and I was really thrilled with what I’d come up with. It was a really neat visual design backed up by what seemed to me to be a really solid backstory; and most importantly, I was pretty confident that Dan would love the end result.

With that, I got to work. It was around the middle of February 2012, and I estimated two months to rig up and sculpt the model.

This would prove to be… optimistic.

The Great Work Begins

A very tall mini must begin with a very tall skeleton. I determined that the model needed to be about 15cm tall in order to fill the required base volume and to visually “read” as a proper battle engine. I printed my standard skeleton armature template out at this size, and then wired up the truly hideous skeleton you see above using really thick (22ga, I believe?) copper wire and putty.

A few notes on the skeleton:

• I needed to decide how the model’s anatomy would be altered to allow for the extra arms. The most obvious place to anchor them would be below the actual arms, but this would require lengthening the rib cage and torso, and I worried that this would look too awkward and strange. Instead, I opted to place them only slightly lower, but to make room for them by pushing them backward, so that they sprouted from the back about 1cm away from the primary arms, but down and backward at about a 45-degree angle.
• The corkscrew hand thingies harken back to a sort-of-horrible technique I used for skeleton rigging until about two years ago, where I thought the only way to attach a hand to a weapon was to wrap the hand wire entirely around the weapon. I’ve subsequently learned some better ways to do this, but for this project, I’ll be using the awful method. You’ll see why it’s so bad later on.

The model’s four swords were also given “skeletons”. I decided that this statue’s weapons would be built to take advantage of their crushing mass, so I shaped them all like meat cleavers. To make these sword rigs, I first drew a shape I liked on a piece of paper, then twisted the thick wire around the shape with pliers. The two ends of the armature were wrapped with very thin wire near the crossguard, which was then further secured by a thin layer of putty.

This was already looking promising. 🙂

Copper wire is reasonably strong in short lengths, but at these large sizes it’s extremely flimsy. To stop it from wobbling so much, I wrapped the entire thing with a layer of Green Stuff putty.

The bulk of the model would not be done in putty, however. That would be nearly impossible given the scale of the model (not to mention ridiculously expensive). Instead, I turned to a medium that was brand new to me, but that had come very highly recommended by nearly every pro sculptor I’ve ever spoken to:

Fimo.

That’s right, kids– this writeup is a landmark for yet another reason, as it will allow you to see the very beginning of my experiments with what has become my primary sculpting material. I would eventually grow to love Fimo, but as you’ll see in the next little bit, the first steps were a bit rough.

I cut some chunks off of the Fimo brick and started applying them to the model. Right away I noticed that it didn’t stick very well to the skeleton underneath; I was only able to get it to stay on by wrapping it the entire way around the leg, and even then, it continued to roll and slide as I applied pressure to it.

The next thing I noticed was that the clay was surprisingly difficult to work with. Clay generally softens as you mash it in your hands, but the Fimo remained fairly rigid; it didn’t smush very well into itself, and tended to crack slightly when bent. It wasn’t totally insurmountable, but I was a bit surprised at how resistant it was to being worked.

I “solved” this problem by treating the Fimo like normal clay– which is to say that I wet it. I kept dipping my tools in water, and the transferred moisture did, indeed, soften the Fimo quite substantially, allowing it to be worked very easily.

With the clay now cooperating, I worked my way along both legs, setting up some very basic under-structure upon which I would build the model’s thick outer layers of armor.

Fairly quickly, though, I started to notice a problem: there were a few spots where I applied a bit too much water, and the clay in these areas was happy to drink up the lot. In these spots the Fimo became extremely soft and wobbly, almost like silly putty. This made it nearly impossible to work details into it, and caused the surface to buckle and wrinkle, as you can sort of see up near the hip in this photo. Even worse, it remained soft even when I left it in the open air for an entire week. It was at this point that I learned a very important lesson:

You do not wet Fimo.

Fimo doesn’t absorb liquids that merely strike it, but it will take in water that sits on it for a prolonged duration and is worked into its volume. And because it’s designed to remain workable for extremely long periods (indicating that it has some moisture-trapping properties already), it will essentially never let go of whatever it takes in. This resistance to drying out is one of the primary selling points of the material– the fact that it remains workable for weeks and months at a time if needed– but becomes a bit of a trap if you ever foolishly moisten it.

So, yeah… just don’t do it.

Learn from Spud’s dumbness. >_<

Once I figured out that wetting the clay wasn’t working, I went back to working with it dry, which simply returned me to the first set of problems– somewhat rigid clay that resisted being worked.

I made do as I worked up the understructure toward the rib cage, but I was starting to become concerned about how I would cope as I got to the exterior layers– was I going to have to struggle with the material throughout the rest of the project?

As I pondered that potentially bleak future, I took a break from the main figure to start working on the swords. Each of the wire frames I had built was filled with a layer of Fimo…

…which was then smushed down against the lid of a cookie tin.

A metal hoe tool was used aid the squishing and to shave off any excess; I wanted to keep the foundation layer as thin as possible to avoid making the final swords too fat.

At this point the main understructure for the body and weapons was finished, and I decided that it was time for the model’s first trip to the oven as I was getting a bit frustrated with 1) the flimsy wires, and 2) the ruined consistency of the leg clay.

The Fimo packet says not to bake above 265°F, but neglects to provide a suggested cook time. Looking for more guidance, I turned to one of the sculpting forums I used to frequent, and was told a few things:

1. Cook time depends on the size of the piece. Small bits (i.e., 1-2mm in thickness) can be baked in as little as 5 minutes, while a standard 30mm mini generally takes 7-10. Very thick pieces can take up to 15, but you rarely want to go beyond that, or else you risk burning the model.
2. The 265° limit on the package is actually a bit higher than most people recommended. I was told to aim for about 225-230°.
3. One thing they all stressed to me was that it’s very important to cook in an oven whose temperature is accurate and can be maintained throughout the cook time. Spud’s apartment oven looks like it was made in the 1950s, and my experiments with an oven thermometer showed me that its temperature essentially just climbs constantly as it works. The pro sculptors agreed that this oven wouldn’t be suitable, so they recommended that I pick up something called a “halogen oven” for baking Fimo.

Alright, that sounds awesome.

So, yeah.

Halogen oven.

Right.

…

…wait, what the hell is a halogen oven?

At a bit of a loss, I turned to the Intarwebs to fill in the gaps in my home appliance knowledge:

So, yeah– that’s basically what they all recommended to me. It looked pretty interesting, but when I attempted to run out and acquire one, I quickly discovered that this is not an appliance that you can simply walk into a store and acquire in exchange for bits of paper with dead people drawn on them. I looked at 15 stores over the course of six weeks, across three cities I happened to be in during that time, and never once ran into one.

About ready to give up, I mentioned my woes to my sister.

• Sandy: “Why don’t you just buy one online?”
• Spud: “Wha?”
• Sandy: “There’s one here on Amazon for, like, eighty bucks.”
• Spud: “…”
• Spud: “Computers are, like, hard, though.”
• Sandy: “…”
• Sandy: “…you’re an idiot.”

Following a month and a half of frustration, the intarwebs sent me a large brown box in three days.

DON’T JUDGE ME.

This is the oven I bought. This exact one doesn’t seem to exist anymore, but there are tons of different models that all look about the same to me over on Amazon. So, go give them money if you want one, I guess.

I unpacked my new acquisition and admired its shininess.

The basic mechanics of the oven go like this:

• The bottom is just a big glass bowl.
• All of the machinery is housed inside the lid. Said machinery consists of an incredibly bright (and thus, incredibly hot) halogen lightbulb, and a series of fans that blow the heat it creates around the bowl.
• There are two dials on the top: a temperature setting, and countdown timer. When you crank the timer to a certain time, the bulb and fans spin up, and stay active until the timer clicks down to 0. The bulb rotates on and off over the cook time in order to maintain your desired temperature, but the fans stay active the entire time.
• The handle at the top shuts the machinery down when you lift it up. This is to prevent you from shooting heat rays out of the lid by picking it up mid-cook, which I consider to be a major design flaw.

You can sort of see the machinery area here.

The whole thing is pretty neat to watch, to be honest. 🙂

With nowhere to go but forward, I dropped the swords into the glass abyss and said a silent prayer to Menoth to cleanse my clay of moisture with holy fire.

SO IT SHALL BE.

…rumbled a thunderous voice from on high.

Baking the model’s understructure resolved the slimy leg consistency issue, but it left me no further ahead for the rest of the model– I was still finding Fimo to be very challenging to work with, and my one attempt at a solution hadn’t panned out. I knew there had to be some sort of solution out there, however– I mean, there’s no way Fimo would be as popular as it is among pro sculptors if it was invariably this difficult to shape.

Desperate for a solution, I went looking for tutorials on Fimo sculpting. I didn’t find a huge number of them, but finally came across my answer when I bought the Fimo sculpting videos featuring Aragorn Marks from Miniature Mentor. Aragorn is one of the original sculptors for Rackham, and was one of the first pro sculptors to advocate for Fimo as a medium over the then-industry standard of Green Stuff. Watching his video, I quickly picked up that he wasn’t simply using straight Fimo. Rather, he was mixing his clay with this:

This white clay is called “Fimo Mix Quick”, and it solved all of my problems. When combined with normal Fimo, Mix Quick dramatically softens the resulting mixture, making it FAR easier to blend and shape. I asked my sculpting forum why Fimo sold this product separately instead of simply selling their clay pre-mixed, and someone explained that it allows the sculptor to determine their own preferred consistency. Having now experiemented a bit with competing brands of clay, I can understand the merits of this approach– I personally find Sculpey, for example, to be a bit too soft, and that brand offers no options (that I’ve found) for softer or harder clays. So for me personally, this limitation makes Sculpey bad for anything except bases.

Personally I’ve found that 60% Fimo and 40% Mix Quick gives a consistency that works well for me: firm enough to resist my metal tools slightly, while soft enough to easily blend into itself and be affected by clayshapers.

The newly-softened Fimo went on much more easily than the standalone clay. You can see in this shot where my metal tools left the figure covered in small marks; contrast this with the shots earlier where the clay was almost entirely smooth after being worked, given how hard I needed to push to make any impression in it at all.

And despite how ready it was to accept tool marks, it wasn’t difficult at all to smooth out where needed. 🙂

With the clay finally cooperating, the rest of the understructure for the entire body went together very quickly. When I was happy with it, I threw it into the oven again to firm it up, and then moved on to the first areas of surface detail.

Superficiality

I ordinarily sculpt models based on pencil sketches, which I use to sort out design and costume elements before committing anything to putty or clay. And while I had done quite a few sketches for this project, they were mostly to determine its overall silhouette and the general feel; I hadn’t progressed the designs to the point where I had any specific armor patterns in mind for any part of the model.

As a result, I was heading into this next segment a bit under-prepared, and I probably should have been more concerned than I was– my track record for designing costumes on the fly wasn’t very good up to that point (and honestly hasn’t improved much even since then). However, I never seem to remember this fact when it’s time to start working on a model.

So, right off the bat, this boot design sucks. I think I was trying for a layered plate design like that on the Cataphract armor, but my version just looks strange.

Beyond the awkward plate design, I really screwed up the basic anatomy here– a walking figure doesn’t plant the back 2/3 of its foot and then raise its toes; it plants just the heel, then rolls until the entire foot is flat, and then rolls again until just the toes are touching. This pose right here mimics precisely no portion of a human walk cycle; and, spoiler alert, I never caught on to this, so it persists even in the final model.

(Sigh… it’s really hard to look back and comment on such old work. I’m by no means perfect now, but I’ve moved past at least some of the bad habits I was prone to back then, and it’s really painful to have to relive them again. 🙁 )

Skorne armor tends to have five major types of plating, which are applied over each warrior’s body in a somewhat mix-and-match pattern:

1. Smooth plate with raised edges
2. Beaten metal plate with visible stippling and raised edges
3. Smooth plate with pattern of studs and raised edges
4. Ribbed plate
5. Smooth plate without raised edges

These foot plates were my first attempt at #1– smooth with raised edges. The proper way to do these would have been to fully sculpt the smooth plate, and then lay a putty snake around the edge which I could squish down and shape into hard edges and angles. However, in these initial stages, I did this the lazy way: I cut the contour of the raised edges into the smooth plate with the tip of a hoe tool, and then pressed the center area down with the flat of a metal tool. This technique seems much faster, but screws up the carefully-shaped plate; instead of being flat the way they were originally sculpted, the plates end up “bubbling up” in the center, with only their edges dropping down low beside the trim. You can clearly see this in the image above.

Not to mention that it’s actually not that much faster in the end due to all the extra work you need to do to smooth the plate back out after you spend all that time mashing its surface to pieces to sink it below the outer edge. :/

Here I’ve added to the total mess by creating a ribbed plate, which makes no sense AND looks really awful and AAAARGH I HATE LOOK AT THIS JUST MOVE ON TO THE NEXT PICTURE

With the boot “shaping up nicely” (at least, in the ignorant darkness of my brain), I kept moving up the model and decided that the next step would be to create some understructure for the model’s skirt. For the front section, I just draped a sheet of Fimo between the two thighs and smoothed the ends into the existing body.

The back required a lot more support, which I created using this frankly awful wire rig. It’s far too large and sticks out too far off the model’s body, but I didn’t understand this because I am a horrible sculptor and I never think anything through. ;_;

With the wire structure in place, I rolled out a sheet of Fimo to lay over it.

This was attached in much the same way as the front piece, flattening its edges into the existing model anywhere they contacted it.

Two things to notice here:

1. The ridiculous amount of extra wire that pokes through at the top. I clipped this off after baking it, but again, if I did this today, that much excess wire would never be there in the first place. >_<
2. The skirt mostly just drapes from the model’s waist to the ground, but the raised heel of the left foot pokes slightly through the “fabric”.

On the front, I closed up the skirt understructure in preparation for baking it. Since this would require also baking the boot, I took some time to “finish” its “fine detail” until it “looked okay”.

*sigh*

Horrible plate design and terrifyingly rough attempt at surface smoothing aside, the one positive outcome here was the network of cracks I etched into the boot to visually communicate its stone construction. I planned to have these cracks run all over the model, and the ones I did on the boot are the only part of it that I don’t despise with the fire of a thousand suns. I did a relatively nice job of running the same crack over multiple plates to communicate to the viewer that the entire boot was carved from a single piece of stone, and not from multiple layered plates as it would be on an actual Skorne warrior. This pattern would continue over the rest of the model, thankfully on much better-designed armor than this.

Once the under-structure for the skirt was baked, I started laying the exterior surface over it. Half-inch-thick strips of Fimo were placed side-by-side, and then squished together with metal tools to form a single unified sheet.

Once this was roughly smoothed out, I started working to create the pleated texture of the skirt. Here I’ve drawn lines in the surface to determine where the folds will fall.

I then used a flat metal tool to pull material up and away from these lines, piling it up in the middle to create raised ridges.

This looked like ass. But more importantly, it made it clear that the ridges were currently much too wide.

So, I repeated the process– I drew a line in the middle of each ridge, and then cut and pulled material away until I had twice as many ridges, each only half as tall.

I did what I could to smooth this out, but ran into several problems. First of all, I had built the understructure too far out, which didn’t give me much room to poke in under the surface of the soft Fimo before I hit a rock-hard barrier. Additionally, I was starting to realize what a pain in the ass I had created for myself by draping the skirt over the raised heel of the left foot; it was poking up through my starting-to-look-nice pattern, and it quickly occurred to me that I didn’t actually know how to shape the ridged skirt around it in a realistic manner.

I tried to cover it up in a really ham-handed fashion by expanding the ridges around it, and simply hoped no-one would notice or comment on it.

Truly the mark of a skilled craftsman, right there. >_<

Sigh.

Just… try not to look at it. :/

The front area of the skirt was coming along much more nicely. I wanted to give the impression that the statue was sculpted to have many layers of robes; underneath the ribbed top layer would be a series of studded flaps, underneath which would be a third layer of more pleated robes, albeit at a smaller scale than the top layer to visually distinguish the two layers.

Here I’ve started defining the lower layer of pleats, as well as the large flat panel that will sit on top of them.

The first flat panel was fairly easy to build, but the second needed to drape over the right leg.

This required some extra support, so I drilled a length of wire into the leg’s understructure and bent it into roughly the shape I needed.

Clay was laid on top of this, with extra material smushed in behind to keep everything stable.

Since I was now draping things over the thigh, I needed to figure out what that part of the armor looked like. I waffled between “poofy pants” and tight plating, but eventually settled on a large, flat Samurai-esque armor sheet. I just really liked the way it looked. 🙂

I realized when working on all of this that the skirt seemed to end a bit too early on this side, so I created a new ridge and stuck it on.

…which completely covered up all the work I had just done on the draped flap, because sometimes that’s how it works when you sculpt. 🙁

At this point I took a stab at the swords. I came up with this design, then decided that I hated it and didn’t work on them again for several weeks.

…

…alrighty then.

Back to the leg!

The completely flat hip plate seemed a bit dull, so I turned it into two layered plates– a stippled plate underneath, with a smooth-ish one on top (both of which still required a ton of clean-up).

I think at this point I was getting close to Christmas-In-March, because I jumped ahead to working on the head much sooner than I ordinarily would; I usually try to finish the chest first.

But, yeah. For whatever reason, it’s face time.

Here I’ve thrown a bunch of clay onto the model’s head in a vaguely face-shaped lump. Worth noting: I ordinarily do NOT sculpt faces by creating a large lump and cutting away from it. Usually, on smaller minis, I create faces additively by applying one meat chunk at a time and then blending them together; but given the huge scale of this face, I was able to take a bit of a shortcut without adversely affecting the end result.

Then I cut a brow and cheekbones out of it.

Then I sort of roughed in some eyes..?

Nose pulled out of the face mass, mouth etched in, and cheekbones given some definition. Aaaaand… hey look, it’s a face!

With the major facial landmarks defined, I started firming everything up. I was shooting for an intermediary level of detail between a fully fleshed-out Skorne face and the semi-abstract faces normally featured on an Ancestral Guardian.

The main face was looking pretty good, so I started bulking out the two side faces.

Grrr! Fear my squishy meat face!

Each of the faces would be given slightly different facial features to really reinforce the idea that there were three distinct personalities locked inside the statue. The central face is the big tough beefcake dude you just saw, while the right-side face would be a stern-looking woman, which is indicated here by more prominent lips.

The left-side face would be another dude, but this would would have leaner features and a more pointy nose (though still a Skorne half-nose with no bulb) and a bit of a “who farted” expression. The story I came up with in my head was that the sculptor of the statue secretly wasn’t terribly fond of this individual, and took his subtle revenge by making him look like a bit of an asshole for all eternity. 🙂

Looking pretty good, I’d say. 😀

With the faces roughed in (they still needed quite a bit of cleanup), I took a stab at the chest armor. To begin, I laid out some vague armor plates.

Which I then partitioned into pointy shapes.

Which I then detailed with raised edges.

Extra spike details were applied by laying on putty snakes, then smushing them into the surface.

I wanted the statue’s costume to be built sort of like samurai armor, which necessitated big poofy sleeves on the upper arms.

These were smushed together and given the vague precursors of cloth folds, and then I further worked the clay on the forearms to show where the visible cloth ended and new armor plates began.

Fun fact: Spud’s favourite part of sculpting and drawing is showing where large chunky objects meet somewhat awkwardly. For example, the spot where the thick back armor plate wraps around and over the front plate. For another example, this warjack‘s huge chunky fingers wrapped around the ‘jack marshal’s shoulders.

I don’t know why, but something about making big chunky bits delicately interact at odd angles pushes some sort of primordial button in the reward center of my brain. 🙂

While playing around on the back of the model, I realized that it looked pretty awesome to have the armor taper in at the waist and then flare back out at the bottom.

I played with the angles and the plate layering a bit more, and ended up with this layout that I really liked. 🙂

Also in this shot: details on big poofy sleeves! 😀 I’m normally really critical of my own cloth work, but I quite like how most of the sleeve folds came out– there’s a good balance between the tension points (elbows and shoulders) and the areas where the cloth is being crammed unevenly underneath an armor plate.

And then I turned the model back around, and realized that while the back was looking awesome, the front was really just a nightmarish mess. And for the first time since I started working on this project, I took a step back and said, “Yaknow, as long as I’m working with a sculpting material with nearly infinite working time, I might as well take advantage of the opportunities that affords me and just start this awful piece over again.”

This time around, I opted to sketch it out first before sculpting anything.

I decided to continue with the shape that had worked out well on the back plate– wide on top, narrow under the rib cage, then flared out at the very bottom– and to have a more intentional design to the various plates instead of just “random Skorne junk crammed everywhere”.

So, yeah. Old design scraped off, new design smushed in with metal tools.

SO MUCH BETTER ALREADY.

I put a big gem in the middle so that the Council would have a place to fire lasers from.

Pew pew!

Pew!

Behold: more of The Lazy Way of making raised-edge plates, because I still hadn’t figured out how bad the results were (though admittedly, they aren’t quite as bad for a plate with a single central ridge like this one will; the real crap results come when you use the technique on an ostensibly flat plate, because you end up with a round bulge that just looks out of place and terrible).

And then I etched some detail on the belly plate (which, like most of what I’m showing you, still requires hours of smoothing after this photo), and we reached the bottom of Page 2.

Btw, fun fact: I installed Page Numbering on my blog just for this article. I’ve never written anything long enough to require it before. But given the massive scale of this mess, it was either page breaks or breaking it up into multiple posts, and SPUD DOES NOT SERIALIZE. >:(