The Jailer

THE JAILER

 

 

 

This sculpt began with a request by a games player on a chat site who had found the above image and wanted help to turn it into a 3D model. By a complex chain of "someone who knew someone else", he found me. We live in different towns but he was able to visit for a day and I began to teach him my method of scratch building a figure.

 

I always start with a full sized plan however simple, so the model can be checked against it. This was the basic armature wire layout.

The shape has been fully realised and wire has been laid onto the plan and soldered- hence the scorch marks.

 

Quite a number of plans were drawn, this one showing the squaring up method for determining positioning of detail features. The wire armature can be seen with loops at waist and shoulders that allow for the thickness of the figure. (Remember, when modelling from a picture, you very rarely get a look at the back or side views, so you have to invent some workable dimensions.

 

Here is the armature bulked with alfoil.This is where a small hammer comes in handy for compressing the foil and making it stay where you put it.

For this model I used Sculpey and this is the first  piece to be added. Sculpey needs to be fresh so it is quickly made pliable and workable. I have had experience with old Sculpey and it is not so accommodating.

 

The rough blocking is complete with no detail at this stage except for the depressions  of the mouth and "chest cage". *This creature is a JAILER, and places captured victims in cages, one built  into its chest and another suspended from a hook stuck into its back!                                



 

Here are the first details which show the really nice way Sculpey can be worked to simulate flesh texture. Small pieces are added and blended into the landscape of the body.



 

I worked on the whole right arm and hand, adding lozenge shaped pieces of clay for the large muscle groups.This is my favourite part of a build - love those oversized muscles.

 

Constant reference to the scale plan helps keep everything on the right track.                                 



 

 

 

The Jailer has a belt made of chain holding up a fur wrapped around him and this was a tricky part to sculpt.You could 'carve' into a mass of clay until something like fur eventuated or you could 'grow' the fur  bit by bit . I felt this second method would result in a more realistic fur wrap in that you could see each tuft  individually and that they could even be made to overlap.



 

Here we see the fur making method allowing the tufts to naturally overlap the chain belt. The chain links were scratch built from aluminium wire that had been hammered square, sized around a jig and super glued. A first look at the back of the monster (helped by some internet research and an amazing 3D program called Z-Brush) and what a back it turned out to be.



 

The Z-Brush pictures showed that the entire back was covered with the corpses of its victims .Maybe it didn't know they were there and someone had used its back as a walking morgue?



 

More detail- teeth, chain links from copper wire, a chest cage (one of 5 that I made for the final diorama, skulls all over the back, a large hook and armour plates. 



 

What a handsome chap,no eyes, a perpetual snarl and dead things all over him.



This is the finished sculpt before painting. Bandages from masking tape strips were added to his wrist and legs, a mace for a weapon and lots of small spheres (from a foam rubber dinosaur) to add to the texture of the back. The next three pictures show the final paint job in a typical Nurgle colour scheme. The model is not a Games Workshop character but the pestilential colours of Nurgle do suit it.



Can you see the poor soldier trapped in the back cage?                                                                       

Now here is a picture that captures all that is gruesome about our world. Before the next paint job I had resprayed the Nurgle scheme an overall yuck dead flesh colour  but we happened to go away for a while and when we returned, a wasp had used the open mouth as a nest. This means of course that it had been hunting caterpillers and laid its eggs on their paralysed bodies, a ready food source for the young wasp larvae. I must have disturbed mum because this poor moth/butterfly to be, was trying to make a break for it.