Week 9 (8 Sep - 14 Sep 2002)
Portal Mouth
When I started the Mini-A-Week project, I imagined painting one miniature a week. I got so much positive feeback on my lousy sculpts from the past couple weeks that I decided to go back to sculpting. The point of the project is to better my mini skills and get me working on projects that I'd otherwise dawdle over; with that in mind, I'm going to paint or sculpt one miniature a week.
This week's offering is a portal mouth. I imagine it to be a worrisome means of travel, or maybe a cave monster, something reminiscent of the Sarlacc from Return of the Jedi. I started with a heavy 2-inch (around 5 cm) washer, the same kind I based my ViC miniature with. I sculpted directly on the washer, using Kneadatite putty. To make the circle around the teeth, I worked some putty into a flat circle, punched out the middle, and worked the rest into a fairly smooth hoop. Getting the shape right actually took quite a while -- I smoothed the putty into place and made sure it was smoothly and securely attached to the washer, then spent some time building up the ridge. When that looked reasonably good, I used a tool that looks something like an angle chisel to cut in the deeper lines. I also sort of tapped it all over the surface to get the texture. I used an awl to tap small holes into the base for additional texture.
For the teeth, I made tiny balls of putty (it surprises me how little is needed) and rolled them into cones. I pushed the cones into place with my main sculpting tool and made sure they were secure at the back and the bottom. I tried to give them the angles of a shark's tooth, but I'm not sure this came out OK.
The ground texture is just repeated tapping and pushing with my main sculpting tool. I was worried about how to handle this texture since I'm not terribly good at this, but it came out reasonably well and I think it'll be fun to paint.
I'm still looking for advice on this -- please let me know what you think about the piece. Any suggestions would be welcome.
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