Tuesday, March 24, 2015

The Hunt (1)

Hi all,

so here's my new project - The Hunt.
The idea was actually inspired by a song.
It's from "Two Steps from Hell" and called "Strength of a Thousand Men" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2RK6OGNMCY
The actual scene I want to build has nothing to do with the song, but the fast pace, the epic chorus is the proper setting for my scene.
The Hunt is to show a female riding a fast paced raptor-style dragon, while hunting a "beast" with the spear. Since such a dragon is rather big, I decided to use a smaller scale for the model than I did for "The Princess" (scale on the right).
Once I drew up the scale using the 7 1/2 head anatomic scheme I started to create the wire armature.
 
And then bent it into the shape I have in mind.
 
Again I used ProCreate to connect the individual wire sections and get everything in shape.
 
Then it was time to look into the dragon.
As mentioned I want it to be a fast riding beast more along the lines of a Raptor than a T-Rex.
So the University of Google provided me with a lot of nice options.
 
I started to build the basic armature from wrapped aluminium foil.
 
For the legs this later proved a mistake....
 
Once pleased with the basic armatures I started to add mass to the "girl" using SuperSculpey "firm"
 
 
Looks a bit "mature content"....
 
But on the dragon it's a totally different story ;)
 
While I pre-baked the female shape (using a heat lamp) I started to sculpt the legs of the dragon.
 
Then switching back to the girl I added her upper torso and arms.
 
Using a compass(?) to transfer the basic measurements.
I continued adding mass to the dragon.
And once the grey underworks for the girl were baked I started to add the first muscles and skin to her, using SuperSculpey standard.
 
The two together...
 
While this looks nice, the main leg couldn't support the weight.
So I chopped it off.
 
and gave it a new, sturdier base, using a cloth wire hanger.
Jurassic prosthetic leg :)
 
This looks now a lot better :)
 
It looked so much better, that I decided to also re-work the other leg.
 
And while these pieces cured I continued with the girl.
 
The dragon now supports his own weight in the running pose.
 
Since my wife was complaining about the smell in our oven after baking the SuperSculpey, I decided to build my own curing oven.
I used an old metal trash bin, some stone tiles, a lot of aluminium foil and my old, very hot light bulb lamp.
 
It worked like a charm - takes longer than the real oven, but I don't have to worry about the smell and cleaning the family oven.

For the remaining sculpting process I decided to add another support to the dragons body - kind of impaling the beast - but this will be removed after the body sculpting.
 
Well, this is as far as I got since March 20th.
So what do you think?
Cheers
Klaus