November 18, 2015 11:55 PM Turnaround Video
Lots and Lots of Pictures
Badass Goat Lady is a go. 🙂
Final thoughts:
- I love this model. It’s absolutely my best work to date technique-wise, and the design appeals to all of my subjective preferences. I’d love to play this character if I ever play D&D as a player again. 🙂
- That said, a lot of the success of this model came from the scale shift. Sculpting at 40mm (or 42mm as it ended up… or actually 48mm if you consider that this person is supposed to be really short at 5 feet tall) is orders of magnitude easier than 30mm, so improvements from my previous work owe a lot to simply being able to work more easily on the slightly larger working area. However, my real take-away from this isn’t “I won’t do it again since it’s cheating!”, but rather “OMG I had a blast and can’t wait to do another large-scale mini!”. And in fact, I have already started working on concepts for some additional characters I want to sculpt at the same scale. More on those in the coming months, assuming ADD doesn’t pull me in some other direction before I get to them. 😉
- The model is currently unpainted. It will likely stay that way for a while. I might decide to paint it someday, or I might find someone else to do that so that it actually looks okay, or I might even see about having some copies cast up since for once it’s a model I like enough to potentially be worth sharing with other people. I haven’t made up my mind on any of these possibilities, and will likely just play it by ear. So you might see this painted someday, or she might just remain “dull off-white with dead black eyes” forever. I’m fickle that way. 😛
- Liveblogging my progress on Facebook was… interesting. Continually getting feedback and encouragement as I worked was helpful, and it was an opportunity to share my work with friends and family who don’t normally frequent this blog. On the other hand, it created a lot of pressure to finish “enough work to show” every couple of hours, which somewhat rushed my work at some spots (like the attachment of the hammer– that probably should have waited for some more foundation work to be done first). I don’t think the model suffered too much for it this time, but if I do ever try live updates again, I’ll need to keep in mind not to let a rush for regular updates impact the quality of my work.
- This was a really fun way to spend my birthday weekend. 🙂
Alrighty, that’s it for today.
Toodles!
“Name me ten old man characters in fantasy and sci-fi. Now name me three old women. The second list was a lot harder, wasn’t it?”
Much harder.
I came up with Zhaan from Farscape (actress was 47 when the show started), McGonagall from Harry Potter, and Ripley (Weaver was 30 when they filmed Alien, and nearly 50 for Alien 4).
Thin pickings.
This is freakin’ amazing. If/when you get casts made, definitely count me in.
Her underlying physique is conveyed very well; I think you nailed your goal of “fantasy armored muscle pixie”. The hair cut does a lot to solidify that. The fur on her cloak is phenomenal – as a painter, I hate it when texture is phoned in. I just as tedious to paint each strand (I imagine, never having sculpted fur), but the effect is incredible when done. Bravo for taking the time to do it. Also, the ram on the hammer is one of my favorite parts, along with the thigh armor.
Do you have any plans to try your hand at a bust? I think you’d have a lot of fun in that kind of exercise, both academically (muscle, structure) and artistically (conveying character with only the head as the medium).
Holy Crap, Spud! I love to read your stuff but 7 pages at once… is there any way you can post shorter installments? Even if you write it all up at once I’d rather get a page a day over a week than what you’re currently doing. I haven’t even made it all the way through your last post yet (the orange one) even though it was really interesting. Please? Think of the children!
Actually, the length of the articles hasn’t increased that much– I average about 7,000 words, and this one is only a bit longer at 10,000.
The only real change that happened with the sudden appearance of pages (which I added to the blog in September) is that I’m now trying to give people a mechanism to remember their place in case they need to come back and finish later. As opposed to before, when I forced people to wade through 7,000 words all on one gigantic page.
So *actually* this is me being a super nice guy.
You’re welcome. 😛
As for releasing in installments, I’ll probably never do that. I personally can’t stand consuming any sort of entertainment in delayed chunks– for example, I only watch TV shows once they’ve been cancelled. When I start a story, a movie, a show, or whatever else, I want to do it knowing that I will be able to finish the entire thing at whatever pace fits my own schedule.
So, yeah. I hate it when installments are foisted upon me, and so I would never do that to all of you nice people.
<3
You’re my new hero!
I’ve been hunting for non-ridiculous female minis since 1990. I’ve managed to find a few in all this time. Not nearly as many as I would have liked. They all had things wrong with them. Whether their poses made them look like they were holding their bladders, or it looked like the sculptor simply glued two bb’s to the chest of the model to make breasts, or they looked fine, and then I realized they weren’t wearing trousers.
Later in life, I learned to sculpt things like pants and shirts on to the models myself.
Sir, you have created a masterpiece! If you ever create copies and would like one painted up, I would consider working on this model a true honour.
P.S. Have you let your inspirational subject know about this? She’d probably be thrilled on the quality, and I think this would make her day
Yours most sincerely, Robert
54mm is a scale people game in. Just saying…