Six minutes in the halogen oven on a temperature a hundred degrees above tolerance burnt and melted six weeks of work. This was on November 3rd, 2013. When it happened, I was so emotionally destroyed that I just threw everything into a box and didn’t look at it until March of the following year.

When I finally worked up the courage to open the box again, I did two things to rip off the band-aid and get myself back into a working frame of mind.

First, I immediately cut all of the swords open…

…extracted the only salvageable part (the wire frames)…

…and threw the destroyed clay in the garbage. I needed to get them out of my sight as soon as possible so that I could stop thinking about horrors past.

The second thing I did was to get out some glue and rigidly lock the temperature gauge on my halogen oven at 225 degrees. My greedy attempt to treat the appliance as both a sculpting and food preparation device had been justly punished, and I would not be making the same mistake again.

And so, with the scent of burnt plastic still wafting off the wire frames, I grimly set my teeth, furrowed my brow, and picked up my tools.

Synthesis

With the swords at last completed after three additional weeks of misery, I set about attaching them to the arms. As mentioned toward the start of the article, I was under the impression during this project that the only effective way to attach a weapon to a model’s arm was to wrap a wire entirely around the sword’s handle; and while this method is indeed fairly secure, it leaves you with an unsightly wire that is often very difficult to remove afterward (and in fact, I failed to adequately cover the wires up for this one).

I’ve now learned some better ways of doing this (which you’ll be able to see in my next sculpting article, due out in October), but for this project, please understand that the way I’m doing this is extremely hack (and nearly caused the model’s eventual painter to murder my family).

Wires were wrapped around the hilt (btw, you may have noticed by now that I don’t entirely know what the parts of a sword are called. I’m pretty sure I’ve used the word “hilt” to describe three separate things during this article), then any excess was removed. This mounting was fairly solid, but still required more structure before it could be trusted.

I used Green Stuff to create a tighter bond between the wrists and the swords, employing extra wire wrappings to hold the swords in position while the putty hardened.

Once the putty set, the model was able to stand with all of its swords in their correct positions without any external support. It was still a bit wobby and wouldn’t stand up to much twisting, but if I was careful, it would hold.

Clay for the hands was wrapped around the sword hilts.

Once the four fingers were placed, I then added some clay for the thumb

Individual fingers were cut into the “mitten”.

And then I started detailing, rounding off each finger and adding preliminary skin wrinkles.

The back of the hand was added next.

One thing to remember when sculpting hands is that each finger has its own length, and the four will rarely all line up. The middle finger’s knuckle rises highest, and in most gripping poses the ring and pinkie fingers curl inward more tightly than the two larger fingers. That isn’t happening here quite as much because this particular hand is gripping perpendicularly, but you’ll be able to see it more clearly on the next one, which has more of an inclined grip.

More detail added to the back of the hand. A sword this heavy would require a very tight grip to wield, so I wanted to show the muscles and tendons straining under its weight (or rather, I figured the Skorne sculptors would know to do this).

This is the more inclined sword grip I mentioned earlier. The process will be much the same as the last one, but the positions of the fingers will vary instead of being lined up.

Basically, the index finger points slightly outward, then each finger down the line points a bit more inward until the pinkie is curled quite far inside.

More hands!

Fun fact: Spud likes sculpting closed fists. Open hands are a nightmare, but closed fists are very easy and quite satisfying to work on. 🙂

Once I was happy with the hands, I tossed both sets of arms into the now temperature-locked oven and firmed them up.

Bam.

With the hands built, I was now able to fill in the missing forearm armor I had started nearly a year before.

These would be built out of two distinct plates: a large fixed plate that remained centered on the back of the forearm, and a “floating” plate that rotated to follow the back of the hand.

The back-of-hand plates were done the horrible way. BOOO LAZY SPUD! BOOOO!

The other plates were done the proper way.

I honestly have no idea why I was mixing both techniques instead of just picking one. Sometimes Spud does weird things that defy explanation.

Oh wait, I gave up on the proper method by the time I got to the next plate.

Phew, for a second there I was worried that I was actually learning.

These received curvy/pointy detailing like the ones on the swords and headdresses. Unlike those ones, these ones kind of sucked.

I think I was getting tired of working on this model.

Which is why it’s a good thing that I was nearly finished; who knows how low my standards would have dropped if this mess had dragged on any longer..?

The last thing the model needed was shoulder pads. I had been struggling with the design for these throughout the entire project. I really wanted large, grandiose shoulder pads in the same style as the headdress, possibly with banners hanging from them, but I just wasn’t able to figure out a design for a large shoulder pad that didn’t hide the two side faces. In the end, I had to settle for a much simpler round plate; I wasn’t happy about it, but it was all I could come up with. :/

As with everything else, the shoulders were constructed to look like separate layered plates.

The bottom plate would be stippled, while the top would be smooth. I later added a gem to the round inset area of each pad, though I apparently forgot to take a photo of it here.

Alright, I think we’re getting close to the end… was there anything else?

Oh, right! Sword tassels!

I wanted to leave these until the swords were mounted to the model so that I could see which direction each one would fall.

I bent the guiding wires toward the ground, then wrapped them in a small length of clay.

These clay lumps were divided into large ropes, which were then further subdivided into individual threads.

And that, ladies and gents… is just about it.

Say hello to the Skorne Dynastic Council.

I finished sculpting the model on December 1st, 2014. On December 7th, I was scheduled to fly to Montréal, where I would be attending Meg Maples‘ last North American painting class before she moved to the land of poison and didgeridoos. Also attending this class was a certain Mr. Yaum, whom you may remember from my previous article:

Mr. Yaum is a substantially better painter than I am, and given the typical demographic of my blog’s readership, I feel fairly confident saying that he’s likely substantially better than you, as well. After nearly two years of utter misery working on this model, there was just no way that I was going to be able to stomach the further pain of trying to apply an acceptable paintjob to it.

I asked Mr. Yaum if he was interested, and after much haggling, he agreed to take the job at the price of four bushels of peaches and a healthy newborn lamb. The price was admittedly a bit steep, but given the bitter cloud of resentment that descended on me every time I looked at the model by this point, I knew it was the only way this thing was ever getting finished. And, of course, you certainly can’t argue with Mr. Yaum’s results.

In the scant few days before I handed the baton off to the next runner, I knew I still had one last task– putting together some sort of base to stand the model on. I’ve had a lot of fun working on Skorne architectural bases in the past, but this time around I was so strapped for time that I literally just threw something together in an afternoon, and the results were kind of… ehh.

Rather than doing a really tall crumbling masonry base as I would have liked, I opted to simply construct some tiles low to the ground as a small base insert. To get the appropriate size, I placed some aluminum foil into a 120mm base and then used a knife to cut it to size.

This would let me sculpt within the base, and then lift the ensuing clay base out when it was time to cook.

See? I learned my lesson from the clay-rolling mess earlier. 🙂

Despite the base not being very tall, it still required a ton of clay.

By this point in my Fimo-using career, I had figured out that Fimo doesn’t stick very well to very smooth surfaces, and that the trick to making it adhere in these situations is to lay down a coat of Green Stuff and then smush the Fimo into it while the putty is still soft.

I decided that the tiling would take up only part of the base, so that I could at least have SOME element of 3-dimensionality to it.

All of the clay scraps were rolled together, and the front edge was smoothed with clayshapers.

I drew up a curvy/pointy shape to use within my tile pattern.

Once it was cut out, I traced around the template with a metal tool to imprint the pattern into the clay.

And then I filled in a bunch of other lines to make it sort of look like I’d done some work on this, even though I had not actually done very much.

I… don’t think I ultimately fooled anyone. ;_;

Once the base was baked, I threw the entire lot into a box and carried it down to Mr. Yaum to have him put the finishing touches on it. I told him at the time that there was absolutely no rush, and that I would prefer he wait until he was in an appropriate state of inspiration rather than rush to work on it when other more interesting projects were at hand.

After all, I told him, Dan had already waited two years to receive it. What’s another six months at that point?

In early July, this package arrived.

Hey look, he made the shitty base look halfway decent! 🙂

And he made the model–

Uh–

@_@

@______@

…

Mr. Yaum, you are a beautiful human being, and the next time I see you I promise that I will kiss you on the mouth.

Yes, that is a threat.