Warrack's Custom Legends: August 2009

I'm batting for the other team now!

That is, I've just made a couple of figures from the DC Universe rather than the Marvel one.

Recently there's been a resurgeance in popularity for the DC hero, Green Lantern. Partly, I believe because he finally has some decent bad guys to fight. One group of these bad guys are known as the Sinestro Corps. These guys want to spread fear throughout the universe and are from all kinds of different alien worlds.

I was contacted to make a couple of them:

Slushh
An acidic blob in a vague humanoid shape with bits of his uniform and dissolved victims floating inside him...

and Tri-Eye, a purple alien with a weird, 3 pronged carnivorous starfish head.

Tri-Eye. Sure he's got a weird head that would take some thinking about how to create in 3 dimensions, but man..... Slushh. No end of problems with that guy.

Anyway, whenever I don't have a clear idea of what I'm creating in my head (as is the case for characters I'm unfamiliar with), I sketch out what I'm aiming to do. If I don't draw a picture my mind can never decide on what I'm supposed to be doing.

Here's my sketches for this coupla mugs:

Things to notice here are that I decided to try and make the 3 separate parts of the head work as one, and to also try and make them look angry even when viewed upside down.

For Slushh I drew a basic outline of what things I wanted in him and a rough sketch of what kind of articulation he was going to have.

So here's the hard work. Slushh first of all.

I am not completely happy with the way Slushh turned out, but he was a huge experiment from the get-go and I'm delighted that he made it out the customisation process in any form.

First step was to create his uniform. As this was going to be contained inside him, I had to get it completely finished at the start. I used papier-mache techniques to make a bib on another figure, painted it, then removed it from the figure (I wasn't going to use this guy beyond him being a clothes model).

I gathered the parts for Slushh. These included joints from a transparent Super Skrull figure and bones from a dinosaur skeleton toy.

Using hot glue, I began to assemble his guts.

And once the guts were all together, I covered them in a transparent clay. The clay wasn't as transparent as I'd hoped and was very difficult to use. I will do another blog entry some time so as to let other people know about how to find and use the stuff, and to remind myself of some of the techniques I used.

And eventually the who thing took shape (a rather blobby one).

One thing I remember very clearly was my complete frustration when I tried to paint the clay. It shrugged off every paint I had! I all ran off it like water and only by working at the paint, and mixing it with PVA glue and laying it on much more heavily that I had wanted was I able to make it stick.

In the end, I'm quite happy with finished thing. I've always wondered about using transparent material, and this was a great chance to work with them. Even if it didn't turn out exactly as I'd planned, I learned a lot.

Here's Slushh:

Tri-Eye wasn't as much hard work, but still a bit of a challenge. I began with an Etrigan figure as I felt he had the right bulk. One thing I wasn't too sure of was how tall Tri-Eye was supposed to be. He never seems to appear next to anything that I could estimate his height from. So I just went with the usual large monster body.

Off his head and cape came along with his S&M bracelets.

I built up his neck so that the starfishy head wouldn't look daft on a wee stem.

I cut Etrigan's face and ears off, and put his head back on, this time with 3 flosser blades attached with hinges from Doctor Octopus's tentacles. I wanted the sections of his head to have some backwards and forwards motion. I also lay down the clay lines of his costume at this stage.

I then started to sculpt his head.

I used the ends of flossers and toothpicks for his teeth

I then gave him a bit of a random purple paint job. And coated the back of his head with hot glue, dragging some of it between the sections of his head.