And I Never Sculpted Fire Again

Unless I somehow end up with a second Denethor... maybe... I kinda hope not...

Anyway, I'm done with these guys until I get to painting them. I have two particular favourites that I look forward to painting, the other three will be a bit of a grind for the sake of getting them all done.

Undercoated Aragorn for the sake of completeness (if I didn't know about that arm....) :

Now that I've got all this puttying out of my system, I'm at a crossroads for what to paint next. On one hand, I've got the Fate of the Witch-king to finish up, but on the other hand, getting the Ringwraiths and Aragorn done would be good too. Maybe I'll hold off on painting this Aragorn because his garb is very similar to the Aragorn I painted a few weeks back - I could to Weathertop Aragorn instead. Hardly solves my problem though....

Until next time, may the wind under your wings bear you to where the sun sails and the moon walks!

Learning as I go

Aragorn's done. As far as sculpting goes anyway. He's undercoated and on the shelf with all the other ready-for-painting models to be done when time allows. I don't have pictures yet, and didn't think to take any before writing up this post.

I've also begun on the other four Ringwraiths. On them, I bulked out the flames first, and allowed the putty to set before moving on. I've only sculpted a couple of flames on each one, so that I don't interfere with the work while working... if that makes any sense.

Whilst doing this, I noted that they looked a lot better than the wraith I posted yesterday. I think the reason yesterday's wraith looked so poor is because of the height of the flames, and their distance apart. The fires on the others aren't as tall, and there's more closer together. They look significantly more natural. In an effort to fix the first one, I've tried to fill gaps between some of the fires, but there's only so much that can be done.

As can be seen, this one looks a lot better than the previous, even though he's far from done and most of the spikes are just cones of putty waiting to be covered later. It will take me several sessions spread across as many days to get them all finished.

I did have a moment this morning where I was absolutely kicking myself - yesterday I stripped two Balrogs - a plastic one, and a metal one, both in the same pose. In my desire to have one of every pose, the plastic one is somewhat surplus to my needs (whereas the metal one with whip wouldn't be when I find one of those). This means that sitting on my shelf are some plastic fires that I could have cut up and used as the basis of these conversions. Sculpting to join bits of those flames to the Nazgul would have been a hell of a lot easier. Oh well!

Until next time, may the wind under your wings bear you to where the sun sails and the moon walks!

I See Fire.... burning the Nazgul

...but it's far from done. In applying the putty and trying to make fire shapes straight away I realised I had made a big mistake. Luckily, only one wraith was going to be done. The putty wasn't staying put as I tried to manipulate it.

I am far from done with this one. In light of what I learned getting it this far, I will go back tomorrow and make more separate tongues of fire by building off the ones that are already there, and add lots of small bits in between the giant spikes that are there now. A couple of spots look okay from some angles, but overall it looks incredibly awkward, and I won't declare it done until it looks good from all angles. It's definitely going to be much more of a challenge that I initially anticipated - and I didn't expect it to be easy back then. I can't wait to get this Derpwraith to a better place.

I'm not totally down about it - I have learned about how to approach largely unsupported areas with an armature (unsupported as in "not enclosed like Boromir's arm"), and it is at least a step in the right direction to a point where visualising the final image isn't so far fetched as it was looking at wires. It's left me with an outlook on the project that is both sulky and eager.

Aragorn has also seen some work, and he too will need another session to thicken his arm and work some more on making his hand to thumb transition look better, as well as rounding the dagger handle a bit to make its cross-section elliptical instead of rectangular. For now, I'm a lot happier with him than the Nazgul above, and he's been a lot more forgiving to the same mistakes that I made on the wraith.

I also mentioned in my last post the need for more tools. Last night I rigged up a temporary tool using some twisted wire and the back end of a woodcut knife handle. It's good enough for working on smooth curves that aren't too deep, and i used it for Aragorn's arm a lot. It and my compass will remain my mainstay choices until I can make some more permanent tools using THIS GUIDE which is makes it quite achievable to make one's own professional quality tools.

Until next time, may the wind under your wings bear you to where the sun sails and the moon walks (and me to my dinner because I'm hungry)!

You're Fired!

Some time ago, I recall seeing a conversion of some Nazgul to be set on fire done by One Ringer ukfreddybear. With the image in my mind, and some spare sub-quality Wraiths sitting around, I thought I'd try my hand at something similar, though to begin with, all I had in mind was that I wanted bigger flames than the ones I'd previously seen - walking bonfires in their full glory.

Example of poor quality pre-conversion Wraith:

Even though in the movie not all the Ringwraiths at Weathertop left in flames, I wanted to make five in case scenario play has a different outcome in the future. I decided that the following poses were best suited to escaping the flames. The undercoated one is from my first Nazgul set, and his sword is made of styrene, the other four are from the replacement set.

The next step was to figure out how I wanted to approach the sculpting. Wanting big flames, I decided that a wire armature would be in order. Were I just doing smaller flames, I probably wouldn't bother. I proceeded to drill several holes in each model where I wanted the largest tongues to be. Drilling onto the convex, high-curvature surfaces of outstretched arms was a bit of a pain, but I got there in the end. Bubbles in the finecast turned out to be quite useful here, and most of the holes I drilled are where bubbles used to be. Swiss cheese anyone?

Next, I cut up a bunch of wire, each piece about 3cm long. I have no intention of making the flames this big, I just wanted to have too much to work with than too little. At this point, I can't decide whether Vlad has been doing too much impaling, the Iron Throne has somehow come to life and attacked them, or if they have the same fungal disease that causes spiders to leave some pretty interesting corpses. It may also be that they're mutating into hedgehogs. After gluing the wires into place, and bending them to reflect the movements of each model that would have led up to their current poses, I cut the wire to a more appropriate length. As you can see in the second picture, one wraith will have the stick stuck in his face from the movie.

I have also recently obtained a few goodies:
Aragorn, Gimli, Lurtz, Merry and Pippin from the Ambush at Amon Hen set
Pippin from the vs. Grishnakh set
Arwen on foot with her sword in one hand
Gandalf (Heroes of the West)
Twilight Wraith with his sword raised
Three Kings of Men that I was missing
Sam from Weathertop, and the one drawing his sword
Frodo that goes with the Sam drawing his sword
Mirror of Galadriel.
There's also an Uruk Battering Ram in the post.

Because he was missing his left arm, Aragorn was thrown into the mix for free. With the help of One Ring member valpas in the form of a photo of the model, I've been able to get an idea of exactly where the missing arm should be in relation to the body. So far it's just a bit of wire and a cut out dagger (you can see the dagger before I cut it out in the first picture in this post). Even though the dagger handle looks a bit big, it's actually the same width as the sword's handle.

I hope to get to sculpting in the next couple of days. I'm a little hesitant to start yet because I usually use the spike of a compass, and I'm not sure how useful that will be for getting the smoother parts of Aragorn's arm and the Wraith's flames to look right, so I'll look into alternative tools before I start.


Until next time, may the wind under your wings bear you to where the sun sails and the moon walks!