Making a Little RPG Monster

For a few years now I've been illustrating a Swedish fantasy role-playing game for kids. Now we, the people involved, are starting a Kickstarter campaign to fund the further development of this game. We decided to film a short sequence set in the game world, and featuring one of the weirder monsters; the "hopper". As you can see in the film still above, it's basically a huge eye on legs.

I didn't have a ready-made eye big enough for this puppet, so I had to make one myself. I decided against using a wooden ball since I've always ended up with visible wood grain, having to cover that up with layers of white paint. Instead I used a metal "marble" as a template for the eye. I pressed the metal ball down into a piece of soft monster clay, just enough for it to not move when pushed.

An old paper toilet roll acted as a containment wall for the DragonSkin Pro silicone which was poured around the ball to create a mold.

Using a new plastic called Rhino, cheaper than the usual products from SmoothOn which I normally use, I cast this bone white ball. What you see here is the top part, which will actually be the back side of the finished eye. I could've used this indentation to create an eye lens, but small air bubbles ended up on this side, so instead I used my Dremel tool to grind down a lens area on the opposite side. I didn't have to cut the silicone mold to get the plastic casting out. It took a bit of prying, but Dragon Skin Pro is flexible enough to allow for some seemingly impossible feats.

I used acrylic model hobby paints to create an iris on the ground down area. With a scalpel I then etched in tiny white lines spreading out from the centre.

For the actual lens I used Glossy Accents scrapbooking plastic. It's basically an air-drying plastic which sets up clear. The cured plastic, fed from a bottle, is slightly flexible, so you can scratch it with something sharp. Resin is preferable, but more expensive, generally a hassle to use and smelly.

I sculpted the front half of the hopping body in medium grade monster clay, mostly using small loop tools. I used the original metal ball as the eye and built up the clay around it.

Here's basically my set of hopping parts before assembling them. From my sculpture a plaster mold was created, and skin-colored latex poured into it to cast a skin, reinforced with a cotton/latex mix. The metal ball was used once again to create an eye socked by smearing silicone clay around it. I could then pop the plastic eye into the silicone socket. The fact that a small portion on the back of the eye was gone didn't hinder the eyeball from swiveling around perfectly. The silicone socket was then attached to the body skin by pressing down melted thermoplastic over the back of the socket and onto the inside of the body skin.

The rest of the puppet construction holds no surprises. The legs were made from four 2 mm aluminum wires each, attached to 4 mm threaded nuts in the feet. The toes were wrapped in yarn and then covered with tinted latex.

A simple wrapping of soft and thin polyurethane foam created the basic shape of the legs, and a very thin foam moist rag was used to produce a smooth outer layer before applying cast latex skins.

I built up the back of the hopping with foam and latex skins. I actually didn't paint this puppet, but simply gave it a light dabbing with a bit of foam dipped in the tinted latex. The toe nails were cut from thick paper and also covered with the latex.

It's remarkable that you can actually get a few subtle expressions from a puppet this simple. It's like using an immobile wooden mask; depending how you show it to your audience, you can make it speak and emote.

Here's the clip the hopping puppet was made for. It appears at about 00:40. This video is all in Swedish.

D & D Monsters: The Owlbear

The strapping gentleman in the photos above is Hawaiian filmmaker/ prop maker/ costume maker/ puppet maker/ mask maker/ stop-motion animator etc John Hankins. Like me he works out of his back yard, creating highly imaginative and entertaining fantasy films on a truly shoestring budget. Check out his YouTube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/user/castlegardener

John's films are actually a two-person show; his wife Alicia is his ever faithful collaborator and supporter, often appearing in the films alongside John in various guises. I've never met John in person but we've been online buddies for years. It's one of those wonderful situations where, at least in my case, I have found through the Internet what I couldn't find where I live; friends sharing the same feverishly passionate interests, and the opinion that nothing is impossible if you just put your heart into it.

Now we're embarking on our first international collaboration -a humorous and hopefully exciting fantasy short film set in the world of the old-school "Dungeons & Dragons" role playing game. John will be shooting the live-action scenes, as well as providing a hand puppet monster, costumes, backgrounds and almost everything else, and I'll be building and animating the monsters he'll encounter.

Long, long ago, when it seemed that my life held an endless mass of disposable time I became enamoured with role playing games, starting with "Dungeons & Dragons" and following with the Swedish game "Drakar & Demoner" ("Dragons & Demons"), with "Tunnels & Trolls", "Runequest", and a smattering of other games and solo adventure game books consumed along the way. Naturally I also made a couple of games with some friends, which never amounted to much. Now I'm actually there again, with the Swedish children's role playing game "Adventure", for which I'm making illustrations and collectible figures.

This is one of the original D & D monsters, here illustrated in the "Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual". It is, of course, an owlbear. Later images of this monster are much more anatomically believable, slickly airbrushed in Photoshop and frankly more fierce-looking. In short, they're much more boring, so this first innocently crude and cartoony drawing is my guide for the owlbear puppet I'm building for the project.

I started off with sculpting the head of the beast in my new favourite material in the world -Monster Maker's Monster Clay. I made the open mouth a solid block of clay to be able to create a one-piece mould for the sculpture. The eyes are glass, and bought some years ago from a Swedish taxidermist supplier. They're some kind of predatory bird's eyes, but I'm no expert on the subject.

Here's the latex cast sitting next to its dental plaster mould. I usually tint the latex for my puppets black or a dark colour to get a good base colour. If the painted-on paint rubs off anywhere I prefer to have a darker colour peeking through under it.

My usual aluminum wire and Friendly Plastic combo for the armature. The yellow finger wire is copper wire encased in soft plastic. The white chest plate is part of a discarded SmoothCast 65D casting. It adds extra support, and a good grab-on section on the puppet when animating.

A mix of variously dense polyurethane foam muscles are glued on with Casco elastic contact cement. The claws are thin cardboard dipped in tinted latex.

And here's the finished brute. The fur is short fake fur, or "teddy" fur, sometimes called "monkey fur". I prefer to make my own feathers, but I've had a small bag of tiny feathers lying around for almost 20 years now, and I figured it would be high time to put them to use. The Monster Manual owlbear looks like he's got a bad toupee on, and I opted for a slightly different look, gluing on the feathers in a semi-circle around the puppet's head using elastic super glue. Liquitex acrylic airbrush colours add a mottled grey pattern to the fur.

Since I didn't have a photo of John in his finished fantasy get-up, my local armoured buddy Martin Merkel stepped in and acted out this staged fight photo with the owlbear. In short, here's how our film is intended to look.

Little Plastic Monsters

For a while now I've been illustrating the kid-friendly role-playing game "Äventyret" ("Adventure") by my fellow Swede Daniel Lehto, and his daughter Julia. It hasn't been making a huge splash in the Swedish gaming community yet, but since it's the only one of its kind it has been receiving very nice reviews and comments. I was actually nominated for best game artist last year.
I believe Julia is 10 now, and since her own fertile imagination is just as powerful as the influences she's getting from other games, the monsters she comes up with for the world of "Äventyret" are rather eccentric.

When I was a kid in the late 1970's, you could actually buy primitive-looking but very charming plastic miniatures of the crazy monsters of Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson's ground-breaking "Dungeons & Dragons " game. I have a few of those.

I suggested that we (or rather, I) do a few "Äventyret" monster figurines, and now we're off and running. It's nothing we'll make any money off, but they're probably good for marketing the game. They'll surely be an eye-catcher at conventions and such gatherings.

I started of with the "hopster"; a bipedal monster of a rather innocent and humorous disposition. This is not a stop-mo puppet project, but I thought it could be interesting to share anyways. Who knows, I might eventually do some "Äventyret" stop-mo monsters, as they are (to me at least) screaming out to be animated.

I've started to use the Monster Makers "Monster Clay", which has a more waxy consistency than the Chavant, and I must say I'm in love. I find that I can work in smaller details faster than in the Chavant. As another example, here's a Roman centurion Medusa chest plate I did for a friend.

..And here's a work in progress for a stop-mo puppet. So, as you can see, the details are crisp, and the hard consistency of the Monster Clay will permit pretty rough handling of the sculpture without denting or smudging, which can happen during the moulding process.

Anyways, to continue with the hopster, I used Chavant to create the containment wall around the sculpture.

Dragonskin FX silicone was mixed and poured into this and left to set.

Most of the little sculpture came out intact from the finished silicone mould. This makes no matter for the project itself, but it shows the softness of the silicone. It's good to know if you're making a mould over a fragile object, for example. To get the sculpture out, I had to cut a slit in the space between the monster's legs. Other than that, the mould is a simple one-peice affair.

For the actual casting of the figure I'm using SmoothCast 65D from SmoothOn. It's semi-rigid, which allows a fair amount of impact resistance, meaning that if you drop the damn thing it won't shatter. SmoothCast 65D sets bright white in colour. I mixed in some So Strong flesh-coloured tint, which created a good base for the figurine. I don't have many So Strong tints, as they are a bit costly, but they do help when casting stuff, as you have a base colour which will always be there, even if some of the painted-on mediums will eventually rub off.

Here's the hopster cast, and ready for its painting and touch-ups. However I cast, I always end up with air bubbles. This will not me remedied until I get a vacuum chamber, which is a costly thing. Until then I simply use epoxy paste to fix larger castings, and I actually use (and recommend) a scrap booking liquid plastic, which is dispensed in droplets from a handy little bottle and dries a flexible transparent plastic. This is good for castings with smaller bubble holes, like the hopster.

The hopster now has a light coat of plastic hobby paint, and some airbrush acrylics applied with a small paintbrush for the eye. I enjoy making these things as much as my stop-mo puppets, and I'll try to find the time to make more of them in the near future.