November

As it turns out, the answer was “It took longer to make the base than the model”.

Seriously. @_e

This next part took place about two weeks later. I had intended to get to it sooner, but I just couldn’t figure out what I wanted her to stand on. Part of me voted for a simple sculpted rock just to get it done, but given all of the work I had put into the model, it felt like cheating to finish her off with something that simple.

I decided that it would be fun to give her some spooky temple masonry to stand on, as I’ve enjoyed sculpting this type of thing in the past.

However, in this case I just had a lot of trouble deciding what the stonework would look like. I really liked the designs I was making based around some sort of poison frog, but given that I had already used an animal motif in the main character’s armour, I didn’t want to give the impression that I was setting up fluff around some sort of “Animal Warrior Factions” conflict. So despite liking the designs, I kept digging around to find something else to do, and eventually decided on “creepy evil torture cult”.

The design that I started with, which you can see at the bottom right of the image above, is a stylized screaming head. The figure is clutching at its eyes, and I figured that there would be a sacrificial altar on top that allowed blood to flow out the model’s mouth over its tongue.

This was, unfortunately, not the most inspiring concept for me, as I find gore and depictions of suffering to be fairly boring and childish. I prefer to keep my work fun. But given that I’d had so few other good ideas, I just sort of shrugged and went with it.

In retrospect I probably should’ve kept sketching… the final base is reasonably good, but it just doesn’t “do it” for me visually. Which is kind of a shame after all the work it took. :/

I initially planned to create the base around a new cork, but since the model was already firmly attached to one, I opted to just use that one. Here I’ve begun hacking away excess cork to give a foundation in approximately the shape of my drawing.

I cut a fairly large void out of the front to allow for a large mouth cavity.

I ended up cutting a bit too much cork away, necessitating the addition of a wire around the base to restore its stability. Once I was satisfied that the cork wouldn’t protrude anywhere, I wrapped it with green stuff strips, and then applied clay over top of it.

Initial shaping on the eyes.

I reworked the mouth to create the more rectangular form that I had drawn.

I hadn’t left quite enough cork to drop the sides of the mouth down far enough, so I sunk a pair of new wires into the cork.

These gave me the structure I needed to create the walls of the mouth.

Next, I added the tongue.

By this point I was finding it nearly impossible to keep my hands out of the clay, so I attached the cork to a wooden disc to act as its new working base.

The tongue wasn’t sticking out at the angle I wanted, so I added a lot more material to it.

Much better.

In this shot you can see where I’ve started building the hands. Almost immediately I found that these didn’t look quite as good as they had on the drawing.

It only got worse as I built out the fingers.

Ugh.

Yeah, maybe no hands.

Another thing that wasn’t really living up to the drawing was the base’s eyes, which here just made it look like a Minion. This was largely because I had made the rims of the circular eyes pop out of the rest of the face; if I carved them down to be flush, I figured that would help dispel the illusion.

…and it mostly did. Combined with the exposed gums and teeth, it was starting to look appropriately creepy.

I went back and forth on the decision to include a nose. I sorted of liked the more abstract look without it, but that was another element contributing the face’s cartoony look, so I ultimately decided to go with a blocky nose.

With the initial rough scratching of some additional masonry elements, the final design of the face was coming into view: it wasn’t just a screaming face, but rather an extensively tortured and mutilated one. The visible gums hinted at a lack of lips, and the abruptly ending cheeks and lolling tongue seemed to indicate a total lack of a lower jaw. So taken as a whole, the evolving concept seemed to be settling on the Creepy Cult People having sculpted a sacrificial altar to look like someone whose face had been flayed and whose jaw had been torn off.

Which simultaneously gave me the concept I needed to proceed confidently with the rest of the work (since I now knew what I was actually making) while cementing the base as “not really my thing”, ultimately dooming me to never like it very much. 🙁

Cleanup work. I added an angular border around the edge of the face, which I decided had been sculpted from a flat stone slab and then affixed to the altar when it was finished.

To further communicate the statue’s status as a flayed face, I used a metal tool to carve parallel grooves into the face in the approximate places that facial muscles would sit.

While working on new areas of the base, I was constantly going back to previous parts for cleanup and edge-straightening. Probably half of the 12 days I spent working on the face were spent only on tidying and nitpicking. So while I won’t come back too often to this part of the face, you’ll see it slowly improving in the background as I discuss other stuff.

With the face coming along as well as could be expected, I set about creating the rest of the column/altar/whatever. Here I’ve set up the “bird bath” bowl at the top where the Creepy Cult People exsanguinate their sacrifices, letting blood collect in the hole at the top before working its way out through the mouth on the front.

I had no real design or plan for the rest of the stonework. I just kept tabbing around between photos of random Inca and Aztec stonework, cribbing bits and pieces that seemed like they would fit.

More definition added to the concentric rectangles, and a ridge added above and below them.

I wanted a pattern in the remaining flat pieces, so I started carving rectangular holes in the surface to see what I could come up with.

Ehh, this didn’t look too bad.

Honestly, I probably would have been better off with a base entirely done with simple patterns like these instead of worrying about a central figurehead.

Sigh. :/

The patterns seemed a bit isolated, so I reworked the bottom ones to make one continuous zigzag of patterns that ran over the entire column.

These required an insane amount of cleanup. They were SO FREAKING WOBBLY. >_<

I wanted some sort of featured detail on the back, so I figured… sure, why not. Let’s throw some snake heads on there.

Creepy Cult People like snakes, right?

Of course they do.

Mouths pressed in with a round metal tool.

I really like the snake heads I made.

I actually considered tearing the stupid flayed face off and replacing it with one of these awesome things… and then I remembered the “War of Animal Emblems” problem I was trying so hard to avoid, and miserably stuck with what I had.

So, yeah. I’ll have to make my peace with only liking the back of the base.

SNAKE TEETH!

Damn those look good.

SIGH. >_<

Anyway, that was pretty much it for the base. I liked parts and hated other parts, but my intention had always been to paint it a very plain crumbly grain stone colour and overgrow it with lichen, so I was pretty sure that I could cover up any parts of it that I didn’t like if I ever actually painted the thing up.

Into the over it all went.

With the sculpting done, the wires were untangled from the bottom of the base…

…and the head was lifted free.

And then I was done.

Pretty pictures on the last page. 🙂