Koralon Hydra Diary

DAY 13

With the main work of the torsos completed, I came to the task of marrying them with the main body. This is one of the tricky tasks I mentioned and it took me a couple of attempts before I was happy with it. First of all, I tried some very alien looking shapes that looked quite cool at first but ended up looking messy.

Finally, I fell back on the first rule of sculpting - if in doubt, keep it simple. I simply followed the line of the upper torsos and blended them in with some folds of thick skin. Later on I will need to cut the model at this point, so I'm not going to finish this area just now. I will wait until I have cut it in half, then finish the job so that the two pieces fit together properly and the join is as unnoticeable as possible.

Next came the task of positioning the arms. I'd been looking forward to this, but I also knew that once done it would make sculpting parts of the model more difficult. It's not so easy modelling the muscles on the arm when there's a Coraline Warstaff in your way!

Taking my time, I slowly bent the arms of the upper torsos and glued the weapons in place to produce poses that looked strong and dynamic while not interfering with each other. I gave the central torso an 'I am the champion' type pose, with both Coraline blades raised above its head. Not only does this look dramatic, but it gets the blades out of the way. The others are stabbing downwards following the direction indicated by the line of their bodies.

On a quick technical point, here's how most sculptors attach weapons to the 'hands' of the wire armature: What you do is flatten the ends of the wire where the hands would be. I use a pair of pliers for this, using a flat part of the jaws to squeeze the wire flat. You can now wrap this flattened wire around the shaft of the weapon and glue it in place using super glue.

I then strengthen the joint with a small amount of milliput, so that the joint is strong enough to handle.

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