| ~150mm tall |
I finished this guy back almost eight months ago but I'm just now getting around to showing him.
Sometimes I just want to make things with no relation to gaming, just craft for craft's sake. Actually, this guy did have a purpose, as I was trying to draw some robots and realized I didn't have a good grasp on the light and shadows. So, I decided to make a maquette, to help me understand how the light falls on a robot from various angles.
The figure was also an experiment to answer a couple of questions: 1) can I make a robot purely out of polymer clay, without kit-bashing any plastic refuse into it; and 2) can I make a figure without an armature? The project answered those questions definitively: Yes to the first, a loud and clear NO to the second.
The sculpture is purely polymer clay, but calling it a sculpture is a bit pretentious; it's more of a scratchbuild. I wanted to ape the super-robot style of Go-Nagai, so I started making simple polymer clay shapes, individual spheres, cylinders, cones, etc. After joining them all together with CA glue, I wrapped it all with thin sheets of polymer clay and styled it to shape the outer body. I did sculpt the head and face "traditionally" and am happy with how that turned out.
The lack of armature means the robot now lies in pieces on my hobby desk. He's served his purpose though. Not only did I get a number of good photos from a variety of lighting angles, I also learned some valuable lessons for the next robot I make.