DOOM - BARON OF HELL

DOOM is back and the monsters looked awesome - so here's a sculpt of the Baron of Hell. The sculpture is made from Super Sculpey and painted in Tamiya acrylics. The base is made from MDF and the rock details are air dry clay over a tin foil armature. Skip to the bottom to see the final figure!

For this particular figure I really wanted to up my 'pose game' So many of my previous sculpts suffer from what I'd called a 'Just standing there dramatically' pose.  What follows is the entire process. It isn't especially noteworthy from my previous work, but I've chimed in on a few things...

Progress shots

 

The standard tin foil bulked aluminum armature. This is in the rough pose and changes a bit as we start roughing out the shapes and balancing the pose out...

One thing of note, with most large super sculpey figures a strong armature is essential. In this case because my monster here is leaning forward a fair bit so he needed some extra support. I really should have made the armature much stronger as the entire sculpture ended up being a pretty heavy amount of clay - but it just about worked in the end.

For skin texturing I used this wired brush I got in a sculpting tool set. I ran it lightly as a final pass on the rougher areas to get some subtle variations. This was done before final smoothing with low odour white spirit (the normal stuff is just too much especially if you're huffing it for hours on end!)

The figure was baked without the head and hands which were added later - The head I wanted to sculpt hollow so I could get an LED in there later on. To make the head hollow I just removed the tin foil inside from the holes where the horns join the head after final baking.

Lookin' rather derp!

Final baking (above) You can see the holes where the horns join the head - this is where the tin foil was scooped out from.

If you look carefully you'll notice the right toe as a green/yellow ish seam. This is milliput - the toe developed a crack during baking and came off (oops). This is always scary but for the most part sculpey breaks fairly linearly and can be repaired easily.

The base

The base is cut from a sheet of MDF and then doubled up for thickness. This is then sanded and routed for finished edges. I then began adding rock detail with air dry clay. Also because the corners of my MDF was a bit knocked I decided to cut these off and have more of an interesting shape instead of a square...YAWN!

my base detail 'plan'

I sculpted the rocks with the sculpture in situ because I wanted him to be interacting with the base in someway - in this example he's holding onto a rock because he has had a few too many drinks.

Primed and ready - also visible are some clear acrylic sections under which I'm sticking some flickering orange LED's for lava. I also utlised a bathroom plug chain to make him look 'metal' and sprayed it a couple of times with a textured paint to make it look all rough and grimy. There's a rock on the left there which I ended up not liking so I didn't use it,

The base fully painted (nearly I guess) I used sand for texture and used a lot of washes and dry brushings of light browns and grey-browns.

For the surface of the lava I used the air dry clay again - but a thin layer of it, then smashed it up and glued it to the surface of the acrylic.

Finished Figure

Thanks for looking!

THE WITCHER (WILD HUNT) - IMLERITH

Have you ever played The Witcher? I did, it's great. Imlerith is a character from that game - he's a baddie. He's also a boss you fight. A hard boss, A frustrating boss with his teleport nonsense - but I liked him despite this, so I plopped open my Monster Clay and set to work.

Sculpting

This entire piece is made with medium grade Monster Clay. The piece was sculpted with removable torso, arms and head to facilitate easier molding later on.

using the long flat aluminum strip stopped the arms from pivoting at the shoulder as I worked

also note - the thread I started using to attach the figure to the base wasn't long enough, so I had to add an extension nut.

For the detail on his armor plates I pushed veneer pins into the clay.

the rough beginnings of the head

I sculpted his actual face to have a sort of two-face thing going on because SPOILER ALERT he gets his ass handed to him in the game. Totally deserves it.

Casting and Refinement

The body was cast in EasyFlo 120. Additional spiny pieces were added later with styrene and milliput. I should have added the extra chest piece to the cast but forgot to add it until much too late. The styrene pieces on the back were added later because they would have been too thin for me to mold and cast with the rest of the chest as one piece.

The shoulder plates were again cast in Easyflo 120. A stryrene master was made over a block of clay and silicone was poured over to create a simple block mould. Resin was slushed around in this mould until I got a good thickness and the excess was trimmed off.

Priming and sanding to find the low spots, small imperfections of the cast pieces are filled with milliput.

With the imperfections filled and the figure primed it's ready for paint!

 

The mace he wields has unusual faces around its business end. To make these all the same one segment was sculpted in Monster clay and then moulded and cast 4 times to make the complete shape.

An aluminum rod was added to the base which connects to his hand.

Painting

Imlerith was painted with Tamiya acrylics. Mostly german grey with some touches of sea grey and a very small bit of blue-green for depth. After wards I sprayed a rough mist of metallic silver to give him an interesting texture.

As a finishing touch - some 'ice' has added as he is quite a frosty so and so. I did this with Deluxe Materials Making Waves, which is traditionally used for... making waves. I thought it made a good icy substitute.

Also I added some fake black leather as his belt and dangly things. Some small half sphere beads (2mm!) were used for detail and glued on to the leather one by one.

For the base I used MDF. Once I'd worked out where he was going to stand I detailed only those areas, leaving the rest of the base smooth - an interesting contrast I thought.

I added some texture with some of that scatter stuff you can get over some body filler. I wanted it too look like he was dragging his mace through the dirt. I later sprayed the whole lot with some muddy browns and a touch of blue and white for some frostiness.

It's Done.

Thanks for looking!