Monster Bash 6. This is an exquisite corpse style miniature and monster building challenge or game started by Miscast (Trent) and continued by Conjured Craft (Terran). There are digital cards you draw six from to make your drawing or sculpture. I found out about Monster Bash via multiple content creators I follow making videos and getting together and making monsters this way. Inspired, I pulled cards last year and never ended up making the monster but I still have the sketch for it.
The monster I made for this Monster Bash 6 was built very differently from the way I normally build. I am chaotic when I sculpt. Most times with clay I find I let the material tell me what it wants to be, but with wire armatures, odd sculpting materials I am not used to, and pseudo deadlines to get these things done by, I had to have some kind of plan. I started within days of the launch, wanting to give myself as much time for paint and clays involved to dry. My cards gave me pustules, veins or thin cracks, a sword in a hand, a banner with a sad face, a ghost, and a crown. My initial sketches gave me a good strategy, long arms, balanced body, and a base for it to stand on.
I started with armature wire and made the basic skeletal structure and a sense of how big this monster was going to be. I filled in space with aluminum foil and started trying to stop the wire from moving inside the armature. I ended up wrapping sections of the body with the Sculpey to lock things in. If you ever find a Sculpey Pasta roller I recommend buying it. I have been using sculpey and fimo for 30 years and curse myself for not getting one earlier. You can make flat sheets of clay without using a rolling pin. I was floored.
Before I got too far, I sized up the feet and tail with the base, making sure the stance was not comically wide or improbable. I realized balance was going to be a problem and ended up changing the banner I drew being on the monsters back to be a staff styled banner would hold for balance. The staff is a wooden skewer for kababs, trimmed with a utility knife and accidentally made into a cross with a bit of super glue. I baked the body once I had the base form all set so it would be easier to add in details as I went. Pustules, knobs, and fingers were added, the fingers were tough. I ended up breaking to sword while trying to bend the armature wire around it but was able to fix it with super glue. Not wanting to put super glue in my oven I used Miliput to make a new had and attach the sword. It worked better than I hoped and opened the floodgates for more Miliput.
Once everything was sculpted, I base coated the model in black matte craft paint and did a few passes to dry brush. I wanted to go with a sickly undead look and ended up raiding my nicer Golden Translucent paints to do a series of wash layers on most of the surface. I expected to do more painting but grew attached to the way the washes looked.
I had never made a banner before, so I cut up some canvas and peeled off the plastic backing mine came with. I stained the canvas with a strange wash I made and painted on three images. I made an eye, a sword, and mountains on the canvas and separated them with shaky linework that almost resembled the shape from the vein card I pulled for inspiration. I initially was just going to glue the banner to the staff but instead used some string to loosely tie the banner on then glue it as well as skulls to the strings.
My undead titan, a servant of an undead lord stalks the land as a herald of dark times ahead. Will the party be able to evade this beast, or will they have to face it in the field of battle.
With everything assembled and painted I had completed my task ahead of schedule and could breathe… or make the other pile of ideas due at the end of the month.
