Between publishing Web content, supporting Privateer Press’ many digital endeavors, and maintaining and upgrading our internal network and resources, I always have somewhere to be and something to do. As anyone who works in IT will tell you, if you want to stay productive, you need to keep your projects moving and your tasks overlapping. Applying this same philosophy to painting and modeling projects can help you tackle even the most mountainous (or dare I say…Gargantuan) of tasks.
I wanted to do something special for my Mountain King to fit with the nautical theme of my burgeoning Trollblood army. I imagined the enraged beast bursting from the frothing depths of the Meredius with sealife clinging to its barnacle-encrusted crags. I wanted my Mountain King to be teeming with hidden creatures like starfish, sea fans, sponges, and urchins. Don’t get the wrong idea though—this won’t be a field trip to the peaceful tide pools of your youth, unless your field trips ended in chaos and hysteria from facing the full and unbridled wrath of a Sea King!
The Mountain King is a gigantic model, which means I have a lot of surface area to cover. My plan is to cover the majority of the rocks with fairly simple shapes like barnacles, sand dollars, and seaweed. I’ll bump up the visual variety with some slightly larger and more complex shapes such as sea stars and sea fans. To top it off, I have a few ideas for accent pieces to add even more character to the model.
I started this project with the venerable Formula P3 Modeling Putty but switched to P3 Brown/Aluminum Putty when it became available. I need to crank out some simple barnacles en masse, so their shapes need to be simple and easy while still being recognizable.
I start by rolling out a small ball of putty and placing it on my work surface. Then I wet the tip of my hobby knife and make a circular indentation in the ball. The last step is to take a wet hobby knife and pull small cuts radiating out from the center of the hole to give the ball texture and imply that it is attached to the surface of the rock. Barnacles look best when clustered together in uneven configurations so I repeated the steps above to make a barnacle triad.
The consummate concept artist Nick Kay suggested that my Sea King needed a crown of coral, so I had to oblige. I started by rolling out a small tube of putty. I pulled a few branches away from the putty with my sculpting tool until I had a rough coral shape, which I scraped off of my work surface and affixed to my Mountain King’s noble brow. I repeated this process, overlapping my coral branches a bit until I had the basic shape of a crown.
It wouldn’t be a Trollblood model without a touch of humor, so I decided to sculpt a Mer-whelp to pose seductively on the Sea King’s shoulder, luring poor unfortunate sailors to their doom with its whelpy wiles. I sifted through the included whelps and found a suitable model to work from. After hacking its legs off I sculpted a rotund tail fin, a full head of luxurious whelp-locks, and finished it off with a seashell brassiere.
As I was working on the Mer-whelp and the coral crown I would often find myself with extra scraps of putty. Rather that letting these harden and go to waste, I used them to add a barnacle or work on another detail somewhere on the model. This way I wasn’t wasting putty, and I wasn’t spending hours sculpting nothing but barnacles. Keeping an eye on multiple aspects of your project will keep you working more efficiently and help motivate you by giving you a break from tedious tasks. I hadn’t yet thought up half of the ideas for this model when I started it, but if you dive in, try something new, and keep things fresh you’ll be surprised at how creative you can be and what you can actually pull off.
I’ve still got a long way to go on this guy, but here’s what I have to show for a few hours’ work.
Stay salty,
Micah