Making Mulg: Part II

This weekend, the process submissions for the Make Something Amazing Contest over at Lost Hemisphere were finally posted.  If you want to go over and take a look mine is a little over halfway down. (brace yourself, it's a long post)

Mulg the Ancient (Privateer Press)

Since I went nutty there and posted it all in limericks, I thought I'd post the original not-as-poetic text here with a few pics not posted over there (we had a limit of 10 afterwhich Captain Spud started adding things like Captain Kangaroo's head onto the photos lol).  This could get long, so I'll post half now and half on another day.

the 'napkin' I submitted

My idea, if you recall, was to make Mulg having never done a sculpt before. I knew I didn't just want to copy the official Mulg sculpt.  So I made a list of what I wanted, because that's how I roll:

• Big Meaty Fists - Larger!
• Stick -> TREE
• Bigger Tusks?
• Runes for Stones - 10th Anniv NQ
• More Dynamic Pose -> Fist upward?
• Change cloth to animal hide
• Bigger shoulder to counterbalance larger fists
• tree should have a few leaves left

I'm a planner; I plan. So Now that I had an idea of what I wanted I started with some sketches to get an idea of the proportions etc. Besides listmaking and research (I think I looked at almost every Mulg model on the interwebz) I always prefer to test before jumping right into something. So at this point I made a tiny little head and flower and baked them according to the package instructions. (see previous post) They turned out nice but I found that the Sculpey was still soft until it cooled. This was a very important discovery; you'll see why in the next post.

Then, using the sketches I made before as reference, I bent some wire (ok, paperclips) into what I figured was a rough shape of what he would need for skeletal structure.  I plopped some Super Sculpey Firm on it to immobilize the hips and shoulders and put it in the oven. 

When it cooled I covered the top in some foil shapes to get the basic bulk of the model.

That foil was covered in thin sheets of Sculpey and baked again.

I'd like to stop and point out that at this point I hadn't seen the usual Mulg model in person. So when we went to a friend's for D&D night I took some time to look at his and carefully note down all of the runes.  It's fair to say that after holding the PP Mulg in my hands I went home in despair. 

But the next day I got up and dove right back in. I added a little more bulk to arms etc and covered the wire for the tree.  (The cylinder sticking up out of the container behind him is for the Troll whelps my husband was making at the same time.)

Then I started building up the musculature on the arms and shoulders.

The pic below is from the same time frame as the one above but from the other side. Here you can see more clearly that the thin layer of sculpey covering the foil is starting to look scorched.  I knew that the rest would have to be done with as few bakes as possible. This was an important lesson learned for future model-making.

After that I started to build up his face and hands and began adding rocks to various places.  Here are some rocks on his fingers.

I knew I'd need to have a base that was Mulg-worthy, but basing is not really my forte. I do think what I came up with worked out really nicely, though.  Here I've built up the layers of cork for him to stand on.  From here on out I did all of his sculpting on this base.

For the tree I made a foil cylinder and covered it with a sheet of polymer clay. This was then slipped over the wire and stuffed with foil to temporarily keep it from slipping around while I attached it to the arm with a hand/wrist.

After that I added some roots to the tree and started adding more rocks to  various parts of his body.

Here Mulg's sculpt is mostly finished (still needs a little 'clothing' in the front to be 'decent') and is nearly ready for the final bake. I put foil under his feet so I could sculpt him on the cork base but he could easily be moved to my baking setup without destroying the feet.

And then here he is getting ready to go into the oven.

You can see my baking setup consisted of a pyrex baking dish and a foil-covered platform.  I couldn't continue to use the ramekin with pebbles that I had been using before because of the tree roots. So I wrapped the pebbles in some foil and poked his foot-wires down into that.

Next time you'll get to see what happened to him after he went into the oven...

Hope you are having a good week!