empty bones

The Start p.1

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The bust itself isn't my proudest work, but all assembled, I rather like how it looks. Fun to put all of the pieces together, and it's been a while since I made anything with one of those removeable masks.

The base sculpture is made purely out of earthenware, and the mask and drone are made mostly out of epoxy putty, with incidentals like wire, bamboo, and metal beads. Painted with acrylics.

Had to include a reference to her two pups in there somewhere, of course. Strung pearls felt appropriate.

Here's full post about the mask itself. And here she is without it:

This one was a good challenge. I wasn't sure about my job with the face at first when I sculpted it, but I got to like it more when doing the painting. Looks better this way. Helps that the all-white eyes stand out so much. (That's what we call good design right there.)

I probably would have done a full upper-body sculpt of this one if I'd had the time, down to the waist, maybe. I did this one sometime in March, though, I think, so my life was mostly School at that point. Ah well; this is good too.

Latest sculpture. This one is of Goumang from Nine Sols, one of my favorite-ever games. I thought she might be fun to sculpt, and I ended up proving myself tremendously correct.

She's made entirely from earthenware clay, and measures around 22cm/9in tall. She's not entirely finished- once she's been fired, I'll add her halo-thing and paint her; I still figured I'd post this version.

(Point-of-view of someone who's about to get two Jiangshi soldiers sicced on them.)

I tried to be as on-model as possible. I stuck mostly to the images in the artbook, since in-game sprites are proportioned for readability more than even cannon accuracy, but even then I took some slight liberties in proportioning her according to my tastes. (This largely meant reducing her head size so it wasn't, you know, a full quarter of her body height.) So she's really based on what she looks like in my head more than anything.

(I did change a few elements of her dragon-chair. That was mostly for practical reasons. I needed the arm-support parts to be sturdy enough, but also needed the back to be low and strong enough to hold up the core part of the figure. So the sides look a little different. Don't worry about it.)

This one took ten days from start to finish, appropriately enough. One day per Sol.

For her expression, I wanted to do something based off of how she interacts with Yi. I've always thought that it was remarkable how Goumang is one of the only Sols who actually seems to do her freaking job, and doesn't seem to have much of an ulterior motive if any at all- and we see quite the different side of her in the Chien comic. So I figure that what we see in the game might well be her worst side; she is, after all, facing off against her lifelong rival, whom she hates deeply. Anyway, I wanted to get across a sense of her deep scorn, but mixed with the haughtiness that she's built up for herself since being made a Sol. It was surprisingly easy to render on a simplistic Solarian head.

(Those ears, too, were quite fun to sculpt.)

I honestly don't think I could have chosen a better subject. I wasn't sure at first, since I thought the whole dynamic sitting pose paired with the difficulties the chair might pose would be a bit ambitious, but it worked out quite well. I'm quite eager to finish this one once it's been fired. Let's just hope it doesn't crack too much in the kiln. I will put a link in the comments once the full version is done, so keep an eye out for that!