Sculpting a Scolipede

Lately I've been in a serious mood to pour some of my creative spasms into something different than paper, this time, sculpture clay was the victim. I've made a few things out of clay before, such as a sweet little piglet for someone's birthday as can be seen below.

But a few days ago, I was up to a bigger challenge: creating one of my favorite Pokémon out of clay. The thing is, I have a lot of Pokémon I like, but not every Pokémon is as easy to translate to a sculpture. *sniffles as she really wants to make a vaporeon* After a lot of searching and thinking of how to make it, I've decided to go with Scolipede.

So what's a Scolipede?

(From Bulbapedia) Scolipede is a centipede-like Pokémon, with bright magenta coloration interspersed with purple rings spaced evenly along its segmented upper body. Its horns, extending from its head in a similar way to antennae, are long and slightly twisted. Purple banding decorates its horns, as well as its similarly-shaped dual tails. It has four pairs of purple-tipped forelegs, capable of injecting poison. Its legs further down its body are longer, with curved black patterns and black tipping on the extremities of the limb. Scolipede are very aggressive, and will chase down its enemies with its horns. It gives no mercy to its opponent until it strikes the final blow.

That's cute... right?

After setting everything up I took a good chunk of clay and started sculpting the main body, which was more or less a big sausage with a big round end and a small narrow end. I've made lots of balls in different sizes to flatten and stretch them for the plates of the body. After that I just needed to press them on. The horns and tails were also made seperately and pressed onto the main body, but without support so they are a bit fragile. The hardest part was without a doubt the legs. They are just so narrow at the bottom... I just couldn't pull it off! Right now they are a lot bigger. I even reinforced them with cardboard, but to no avail. In any case, my sculpture was finished!

Too bad I'm not as patient as some to let the sculpture airdry, so I took our hair dryer and gave the clay a full load of hot air. (at a safe distance of course, I didn't want it to break!) 7 minutes later the Scolipede was ready for some paint.


Luckily I still had lots of paint left from the piglet, so mixing colors to get the right ones for scolipede was fairly easy. I started with magenta for its upper body and didn't bother too much to paint it with precision. After all, a darker color was needed for its belly and accents, so it would mask the red easily.

After painting the belly and accents dark grey I applied a generous amount of yellow on the bottom half of its eye. Sadly at this point I wasn't really having a steadfast hand anymore so the painting overlapped at some points, but I couldn't be bothered, it was so close to being finished! With some mixture of magenta, cerulean blue and a bit of white to tone down the color I've added the remaining markings and poison points ( I was too lazy to sculpt those, afraid they might break too easily anyway) and added the pupils with the tip of my brush. Et voila! My scolipede was done.

 

 

 

Oh hai!

Being all proud of myself I took it downstairs to take some pictures with it featuring my mother's fancy plant in the background. (The color just matches you know?) ^^

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Until next time!