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Hi all,

I want to have a crack at making a squiggoth for my orks. I'm planning on it being armour plated to reduce the amount of fine details I have to sculpt to filling the gaps and making the head & feet, but I'm wondering if there are any tips & tricks I can get before I start. Namely, how do I start on such a stocky sculpt? Is it advisable to build a frame to sculpt over, and if so, out of what? what should I use to fill the bulk out without using up expensive greenstuff? Are there any no-go materials for building said frame (EG screwed up foil, cardboard tubes, plasticard) which will react badly or not hold up?

What I want to make is the normal squiggoth, not the gargantuan (baby steps!), so roughly trukk sized. It's the bulk of the body I'm most concerned with, I think. My gut feeling is to make a frame which comes apart (limbs, body, head, tail) and which I can sculpt separately for ease of access before putting them together and filling the gaps. Is this about right? or should I be looking at sculpting the entire thing? I was considering using a tennis ball as the bulk of the chest, I was thinking that the greenstuff will stick to it with the tenacity with which it clings to carpet!

Cheers!

I'm no super-sculptor, but from what I saw and done, for such things, it is better to make a frame first. Thick, aluminum wire would be ideal I think. Cheap, light and easy to form.

For the filling, Milliput would be good I think. It's fairly cheap and comes in large quantities.

For other questions, I don't have enough knowledge to give you constructive input. Sorry.

If I m thinking the right thing, a good thing to use for armatures for big thick things like that is aluminium foil. You can ball it up into whatever shapes you like, then compress it into a solid form. One of the sculptors I follow on Instagram does that. If you're on there check out morbid_monstrosities.


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Use milliput for your basic sculpt, and filling large areas. Then I mix a 50/50 mix of milli and GS for your detailed final sculpting.

One thing you might want to look into is constructing your frame (which you definitely want - unless you are very good at coordinating imagination and execution, you want to sketch out where you're going) out of plastic sprue. It's cheap, people like us end up with more than we like to admit, and it has the Lego thing going for it that you can add small pieces on top of each other to round out your construction bit by bit before you put a putty skin over the whole thing. Since plastic cement bonds it securely, you can work in hollow spaces to save material and weight, and if you want to work with plasticard for the armor, you'll have a frame that again gives you a solid bond with plastic cement.

I have sculpted considerably over the years some fairly large fantasy figures and here is what I always did, but certainly not the only way.

1. Create a basic wire form - basically, just bendable baling wire that holds its shape.
2. Use aluminum foil to crush on the frame to create the large/thick spaces. AF is cheap and extremely shape-able. while being light weight
3. I used the air dry paper-mache type material, Das Pronto, to make the basic shape. It air dries with little shrinkage and is super hard. Normally, I would continue to finish the sculpt with Das Pronto (a great sculpting medium) or you can then switch to an outer covering of any epoxy putty you want - milliput, green stuff, etc.

Note - I would always attach the wire form to a base, so you have the figure upright and sturdy, but that could be optional for you.

Good luck and we want to see pics!!

Thank-you all for the advice!

Good shout on using sprue, but alas I haven't bought any Warhammer for some years, and the only sprues I have are still full. I do have a good quantity of plasticard and polystyrene lollipop sticks (about 4mm diameter, useful for this I imagine) so I'm thinking I'll be guestimating where the armour plate will be and then having some sticks poking out of the sculpt to glue to, or sculpt over if I get it wrong!

I think that this project will help me to clear out some of my offcuts of plastic rods & plasticard!

I will probably use foil to help with the bulk of the body, and the plastic for the "skeleton" of it.

No idea when I'll be starting (got a mountain of junk to clear from my desk first!) but I will certainly be making a thread for it on here!