Assignment: Mandy Morbid

I have recently accepted a sculpting commission to create the official miniature for Mandy Morbid's D&D character featured in the web series I Hit it With My Axe. The character is described as a tiefling in plate armor.

I will be documenting the entire process of the design from initial concept art through the final sculpting and casting of the figure. So, once the project is complete and approved I can share the process that I used to create her iconic custom miniature gaming figure. Check back here for the complete tutorial. In the meantime check out the episodes over at The Escapist.

Con Recovery

I have survived yet another ReaperCon!

The week long ordeal couldn't have come at a more inopportune time with us being only a couple of weeks away from going to press on Warlord: Savage North and my pending sculpting deadlines.

But the entire experience was utterly incredible. Once again Vicky and I were welcomed as one of the Reaper Miniatures' extended family and given rock star treatment. The hotel they put us up in was fantastic even though they kept turning off the AC so our room was scorching hot when we returned in the evenings.

Vicky made a massive amount of awesome cake for the attendees which was gone by the second day of the show.

Ron printed sample copies of the book for attendees to preview throughout the course of the show. All of the feedback was extremely positive and everyone was excited about the new work. I took several new sculpts in various stages of completion and got lots of great compliments from everyone, particularly the other notable guest sculptors. The play-testers and designers even invited me to participate in a session of Crisis Point, Reaper's new super hero battle game that I have sculpted several pieces for. We both had a fantastic time the whole week.

One of the most exciting parts of the entire event for me was getting the opportunity to preview a small sample of my ultra cool and top secret project for the Reaper game line. It is a sci-fi battle game based on some of the alien characters I sculpted for their Chronoscope figure line last year. After passing around my little printed mock-up of the setting, I got a great amount of enthusiasm and excitement about the material from the Warlord development group as well as the owners and potential members of the design team. We will be putting the project on the schedule for publication and I'll be posting more about its development soon.

Utterly exhausted, I am now back at the studio to finish up the current batch of new sculpts and will be completing the rest of the work for the book. I'll be posting again soon with some new pictures of the figures and samples of what we're working on as soon as I'm able.

Latest Work

Here is a bunch of new things I recently turned in to Reaper.

To check out more head on over to the Reaper Miniatures Previews page.

February and March were massively busy for us with commission sculpting and working on the new Savage North book for the Warlord game. The design team over at Reaper were taken with the work Vicky and I were doing on the book elements, so they have turned over the layout project to us to handle for the book design. We hope to have a preview copy available by ReaperCon. More on that as it gets further along.

During that time I also completed a fantasy football team of zombies and undead for Roll Jordan Miniatures. The first part of the team consists of 8 different figures, some with additional arms and heads for variety. Here are some shots they posted over at Talk Fantasy Football. I'll be doing some additional pieces for this team as well as some female elves over the next few months.

Impact! Minitures have also posted the first two figures for their Timberline Elf Team. The finished team will feature twelve models in all including some lovely, leafy dryads. Here are the first two that are available now in their online shop.

Currently on the bench are pieces for Dragonblood Miniatures and Secret Skeleton but I'll post those once they get the stamp of approval. The Dragonblood line was recently acquired by Cavalcade Wargames and will continue to release pieces.

I will also be teaching three sculpting classes at ReaperCon in May.
SC10-01: Mastering materials
SC10-06: Basing and Terrain
SC10-08: Anatomy and Armatures
Head on over to the page and sign up. Hope to see you there!

Armatures

Download the full resolution printable PDF

An armature is the skeleton that all sculptures are built on and provides a foundation for the pose to act as a guide for proportions.

I've seen quite a few elaborate armature constructs and sculpting rigs that took more time and effort away from the actual sculpting than what I wanted to spend. There are even a few expensive setups you can purchase ready-made but are more pricey than I what wanted to spend. What it has really come down to is the fastest, cheapest, easiest and most accurate way to make an armature and get to the sculpting part as soon as possible.

Small Scale Armatures

I initially started off using the Reaper Advanced Level Sculpting Armatures - #75002 which was a great time saver and gave a good approximation of the size most figures are being sculpted around. These are great time-savers and are particularly useful for male figures or heavily armored characters.

When I need something more slender, I will go with a wire armature. Most all of the sculpts I do now are made over wire. I use a silver-plated copper beading wire in two main sizes. The most commonly used is 26 gauge and is flexable enough to pose easily, yet strong. The 22 gauge is used for bulkier figures or for larger scales like 54mm. Also, this particular wire is easy to cut through. If I need to take an arm off for modification or for molding, it is easy to cut through the putty and break the wire free without causing unnecessary damage to the sculpture.

For normal 28mm or 30mm human-sized figures, I generally cut two 3" lengths of wire and twist them together. Start about 1/3rd of the way in and twist until you have about a quarter of an inch to the twist. This will give you a general torso length to the armature. You will have one pair of wires that are longer than the other. The longer ones will be the legs.

I then bend the wire at the shoulders and hips. You can use one of the Reaper armatures as guide for size. Generally a 1/8" bend will give a good width for the shoulders and hips. I cover this with a bit of putty, typically straight ProCreate to secure the pelvis area and the ribcage so I can pose it easier. 

At this point I also like to add a little neck wire. I fold over one end of the wire with pliers and add a small blob of putty. This is then attached to one side of the ribcage and then smoothed into the rest of the putty. This all goes under the 60W lamp for 30 minutes or more to make sure the putty has fully cured.

The armature can now be attached to a cork or gripped in a clamp and posed appropriately. Here I have printed out several poses of a model to check the size and proportions of the armature. The neck wire is left longer than the top of the head. This extra length is trimmed and then folded down to attach the head at the appropriate height. You can sculpt the head directly on the armature at this point. I sculpt the heads separately whenever possible and then attach them to the neck. This allows the greatest flexibility to adjust the pose and position of the head.

I leave a bit of extra wire at the feet and bend it to where the wire forms a foot. This allows the figure to be mounted at the toe, which is very important for a lot of action poses. The wire is trimmed with a pair of wire cutters at a steep angle making a sharp point on the end. This allows the wire to be inserted into a cork base much easier. Watch your delicate fingers, though! Most of the time I use corks to hold my sculpts as I work on them. After drilling a couple of small holes in the surface putty of the cork I insert the wire and then secure it a bit at the feet with more putty.

I used to just lock the armature in one of my custom-made wooden clamps but found this to be cumbersome and difficult to grip while working.

I try to make up lots of armatures and then keep them on hand ready to sculpt. After they are posed I stick them to regular ole' cork stoppers for finalizing the pose and sculpting. The most common sizes are the ones with 1", 1 1/2" and 2" bases (or tops), the largest part. This gives a good foot spread for common slotted base sizes.

Some of the corks I mounted on 2" lengths of plastic PVC plumber's pipe. This gives a more comfortable grip especially for smaller figures or for sculpting faces. I basically jammed the small end of the cork into one end of the tubing section and then hot-glued it into place. Of course, your best bet is just to use what's comfortable for you.

Large Scale Armatures

Printable Armature Diagram - PDF 568k

I can't take any credit for this approach or design, that goes to Chuck Needham, a fantastic historical and garage kit figure sculptor you can visit over at 2Bit Studio.

What makes this design so cool is its' modular layout. The diagram is one I downloaded from Chuck's site and adapted to different scales. The proportions are all correct regardless of what size you scale the diagram since they are all based on an average human skeleton. Creatures can even be based on this with a few modifications to the lengths of the limbs.

Once the correct size is selected, I bend two lengths of the wire in the shape following the limbs with a pair of needle-nosed pliers, one for the left limbs and one for the right. Another length is cut and curled around the skull diagram to provide a solid base for the armature's head. Chuck made a fancy bending jig to wrap his wire around but I work in so many different sizes I normally just trace the shapes with the wire directly from the print-out.

For larger scale figures I use a basic aluminum wire. The parts of the armature are wrapped with a thinner "floral" wire and then secured with either a blob of Aves Apoxie (shown here) or sometimes with JB Kwik epoxy.

The extra length of wire coming from the head section strengthens the "spine" and is bent at the hips to create a mounting point for the stand. Alternately, you can leave additional lengths on the bottom of each foot to attach to a base for sculpting.

Sometimes a brace of some sort is in order to support the sculpture as you work on it. The rig shown here is made from inexpensive parts found at the local hardware or DIY. The threaded rod is 1/4" coarse and fitted with corresponding wingnuts and lock-washers to make repositioning a snap. The small L-shaped shelf brackets are used to hold the support rod to the base rod.

It's very important to note that to get this to work correctly the bracket must be bent off center a bit to allow the second rod to pass through at the side. This is shown more clearly in the closer photo.

All of this is mounted to a simple wooden stand.

The whole setup cost about $20USD and supplied enough materials for four sculpting stands. That comes in really handy if you work on several figures at a time.

I tend to make up a few armatures of different sizes and keep them on hand. That makes it especially useful when mixing up a batch of epoxy putty that none of it goes to waste. There's always an armature handy to stick it onto.

New Sculpts Available

I just finished painting some castings of sculpts I recently did for Reaper Miniatures. The deadline for this year's Spectrum submissions is this coming Friday so I wanted to have some photos of the new pieces to send in.

The first piece is Shaerileth the Spider Demon. I decided to go with a straight "dark elf" color scheme on this one and went with blacks and violets. There are striped markings on the legs and abdomen in a lighter violet to tie in the skin tone.

My second entry is Takhi the Lupine Arctic Shaman for the Koborlas faction of Reaper's tabletop battle game Warlord. Since he is in a snow covered setting I decided to go with warm browns and grays to make him stand out against the cool colors of the frost covered base. The base is a resin casting which will soon be available from Resinwerks.

Currently I'm working on some new sculpts for Reaper's Chronoscope line and painting up some new figures that will be available soon in addition to starting my new line line of resin cast game accessories and bases. Design work continues to move forward on Reaper's new Warlord book Savage North and I have completed faction symbols and insignias for some of the new armies that will be included in the book. In addition to that I am also working on new designs for a Sci-fi tabletop battle game of my own.

Holiday work

Currently being between sculpting assignments, I was asked by Reaper Miniatures to help with the production on the pewter figure of the Highland Stalker mount for Everquest!

It has entailed a LOT of polishing, some spray sealing and packaging but is still cool to be part of the process. Click on the links to see how you can get your very own.

Matt Dixon's Babes in metal

Impact! Miniatures announced Tuesday the release of two licensed minis based on Matt Dixon's art, that will be available starting in February.

This is significant because - well . . . I sculpted them!

They have posted a little preview thread all about it over at their forms. Feel free to hop on over there and check out the discussion through the courtesy of THIS LINK!

December News!

Reaper released the Illyrian Scout mini today!

He is available in the Reaper Asylum online store for a mere $3.99! Waste no time and order hundreds! - - - - > Click Here

This character may seem familiar since he is the same type of alien as Smap. Smap was a character I created 25 years ago for a sci fi short film idea. He has since appeared in an unpublished comic and two animated shorts (which are misplaced that I'm still looking for). A couple of years back I sculpted him as a limited edition figure for my own line of boutique miniatures. More recently his species has been the subject for development of a sci fi tabletop battle game. I have written quite a bit about the little critters so be expecting to see more of them.

Fembot scrap

This lovely device was just a bit on the thin side to mold and cast properly so it will be scrapped in favor of a slightly thicker figure. So - I thought I'd post it here for you to see what I've been up to.

Because of the way the figures are molded for metal casting the final piece would result in a figure that either wouldn't fill the mold cavity properly or would be too delicate for packaging. I will be redesigning another one at some point that will be reproducible.

Spider Demon

Reaper has posted some shots of a hastily assembled version of the Spider Queen model I sculpted for them. She will be available in January as 03465: Shaerileth, Spider Demon.



I am currently assembling and painting one of the master castings and will post photos of that along with a quick assembly guide soon.

Events for October

Even though I am sculpting my fingers off there are a couple of notable things going on that I will be participating in this month. As the Fates would have it - they are both occurring the same day.

First up is the monthly meeting for A Bunch of Short Guys on Saturday Oct. 24th from 10am to noon. ABOSG is a Dallas-based non-profit animation guild established to foster a community of world-class artists and storytellers. The group provides an educational resource for the local community of entertainment professionals, educators and students, helping visual creators pursue career development.

This month they are having a panel on sculpting and have invited me to participate with other local sculptors to talk about our working methods, materials and the industries we work in. I am very excited about this opportunity.

Second is Reaper Artist Con going on all day Saturday Oct. 24th. This is generally a closed event that is a week-long workshop from Wenesday to Wednesday where the sculptors and painters meet to share techniques and tips and generally level-up. The Saturday in between is an open house where folks can come out and meet the pros, talk shop and other shenanigans.

So - I'll be splitting my time with the two events. If you are in the Dallas/Plano/Denton area pop by and check out one or both of these events.

Sculpting for September

This full-time sculpting gig is great! I've really been able to get to work on some projects that have been brewing in the back of my mind while going through the whole film project process. Now that all of that is finished I can finally get back to my first original passion of sculpting.

I just finished two sculpts for IMPACT! Miniatures based on a couple of pieces of art they licensed from Matt Dixon. Those are off and away in the post - hopefully they will arrive safe 'n' sound.

In addition to that, I turned in an all new torso for the Spider Queen sculpt to Reaper Miniatures along with four other figures for their new Chronoscope line which they have posted on their site.

I'm currently working on six other pieces with the infernal "green stuff' and will post those as soon as I can. Also, I will be moving the content from the old MorganKeith Studios website to here since I will be continuing painting and sculpting in miniature. Vicky has now branched out into cake design and she will have her own web space with all of that stuff as soon as I can get the code finished.

More soon.

P -

Illustration

Visit my CGSociety portfolio too.

Contact me at work@patrickkeith.com

Visit my CGSociety portfolio too.