Sculpts, plush, and doodles

[MinniBat]

I'm not on a super duper lot with all the projects I'm working on right now but those also include a lot of custom figure orders, I figured since people were nice enough to point me to the art forum I should behave and make a post here  Also the roseate Wilson post was archived so I don't know if that's because I did something bad lol

I have a LOT of WIPs, I'm always starting things when I have a full plate like a big dummy. Feel free to ask me about customized figure or doodle commissions but due to the unpredictable amount of time I take to do plush and sculpts I'm not going to be taking commissions on those for some time ( I have no prob sculpting accessories like food or props etc but I take far too long on character sculptures and I always feel guilty making people wait even though I don't take payment til the end ). I usually do customs for $55 +the cost of the figure when I have to order it ( if you have one you'd like me to use I have no problem doing that ). I do these sales through Etsy.

Customized figures

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Just got a commission for Triumphant Wes so he'll be coming soon too. There's plenty of others I'd love to do but some I'm really curious about is how big the spider and Maxwell figures are in comparison to the rest and if I could make proportional Webber and Waxwell customs with them. With Hamlet coming up and all the new characters in the Forge/ Gorge I'm sure the pigs could be fun to work with too. Maybe sometime soon I'll save up some extra money and buy a retail box of 16 and do an unboxing video and do some random customs with whatever I get the most of.

 

Sculptures

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This guy's WAY old and REALLY needs to be touched up lol. I thought leaving him a little rough looking would be appropriate but I'd really rather have a nice smooth/ clean sculpt and then maybe do a few nicks and marks with a knife/ paint. I'll give him proper joints and obviously the rest of his body- I wanted to give him an accordion body with some electrical tape and cardboard which I'm still excited to experiment with even years after not touching him. Maybe even LED eyes? Sorry about the cruddy gif, this was back when the iphone 4 was the newest thing.

So ignore the bases for these, they're Animal Crossing amiibo bases and just what I had handy at the time ( the wire armature comes out through the feet so I can secure them into the bases when they're done ). Thought it'd be cool to do sculpts of skins based on the portraits they're released with. I thiiink these two don't need any more adjustments to the sculpt which means I can start finalizing the paint. I'd like to add some actual little eyelashes once they're all done  As for the bases for the roseates ( will hopefully do more chars/ more skins )... I'm thinking if it's not too laborious I'll make a little replica of the portal for them to stand under and have them on the lighter grassy areas. I considered for a while putting these on checkerboard turf but I feel these ones are more "Charlie" and I should reserve environmental pieces like the checkerboard turf for "Maxwell"-esque skins ( Guest of Honor ).

 

Plush

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Wes was featured in a stream a while back, currently he's all ripped apart as I'm remaking him with minky. I love working with felt since it's so cheap and easy to manipulate plus I can felt details on, but I'm the first to admit it's not a quality material. And I'm always so put off by how easily it picks up hair and... everything else. Took him to the circus and got caramel on his shirt so I had to wash it so I'm gonna have to remake that too lol. Planning on doing his hair and features with velcro so while it'll be pricier I can make all his skins possible with one doll by making all the differentiating features interchangeable. If it turns out well I'll probably do the same for other characters when I get around to them.... when I have more time and energy to sew a bunch of the same character.

Max is... certainly gonna be a challenge when I finalize him in minky. He's so lumpy. Might be a while til I even go back to the felt version because he's just so... perplexing. Definitely planning on using a gray instead of black for his hair and just drawing the black on to make him look older. I also am certainly not going to use blue around the eyes in the final project lol ( I think the screenshots I'd been using were from spring or winter or something and I didn't even think about how DS has the seasonal hue shift ). Eyes are gonna be a lil smaller too and lines I'll hopefully embroider instead so they're cleaner. I have a little voicebox recorded with some of his in-game "lines" ( Waxwell, not NPC Maxwell ) which will activate when you squeeze his hand : )

I know it looks really buldgey right now, it'll look more normal once I've worked on it a bit and stuffed it. The eye is a half a blank plastic ornament I got at Joanns, the nose and teeth ( which I'll probably redo, I wanted to make them look really gritty and nasty and was even gonna see if I could do drool with resin, but I'm just not diggin it ) are polymer clay. To make the mouth part I used pastel tinted transparent polymer to sculpt gums onto pieces of cardboard, and gave them a coat of liquid latex for texture. The tongue is a makeup wedge sponge cut into shape, tinted with pastel and coated with some silicone- has a really great, really tongue-esque texture. I've been collecting real deer hooves and carving them down to the right size for the feet and I'm also toying with the arms at the moment. Deerclops has a voicebox as well of one of his "warning moans" before he spawns and his bleat. It sounds when you squeeze his tummy, but the model I'm using is a little muffly ( hoping the stuffing will actually make it sound a little better since you won't hear the static the box picks up when recording ).

 

Doodles

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Obviously I'm not gonna put ALL my DS drawings here but here are some I particularly like from over the years

Here's where it gets pretty old

 

 

[ResettePlayer]

Holy moly oh cannoli. These are amazing! You did a spectacularly at capturing the characters in a 3D medium, both in clay and felt. Fantastic job, I look forward to seeing any future projects of yours!

[MinniBat]

13 hours ago, ResettePlayer said:

Holy moly oh cannoli. These are amazing! You did a spectacularly at capturing the characters in a 3D medium, both in clay and felt. Fantastic job, I look forward to seeing any future projects of yours!

Thank you! I always strive to make my stuff look like it would if the character came to life. I always love hearing it's working 

[Auspice]

Welcome to the art forums! Wow, your sculptures and plushes (plushies?) are so well done. It takes me ages to get clay to cooperate and, while it usually turns out alright, it doesn't turn out the way I saw it in my head. 

I love the details in your doodles, they look great! 

[gallusvarius]

This stuff is really cool! The plushies and the drawings both.
I can see you're another fan of Wes. He's a likable character. 

The knight chess sculpture is really impressive.

[minespatch]

On 8/14/2018 at 11:26 PM, MinniBat said:

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1. Good luck on finishing that project, it looks like a complex project
2. The mouth looks like my cat Gizmo when she's ready to hiss.
3. Man! Those two look very time intensive and put with a lot of love into them. Nice! The color palettes also contrast with colder colors on the left one and warmer on the right.
4. The lighting fascinates me on this one. Wes given a dramatic lighting similar to how film noir executes.
5. Has a Gravity Falls type aesthetic but is definitely your work. There's a nice balance in this art.

[MinniBat]

Hey guys! Been a while. Been busy with college again ( stop motion and general animation is taking up most of my time right now but I'll have something good related to that in the near future ) ( you can follow Aesthdeadic on tumblr to get more regular art updates from me ). Even if I don't reply to every comment I read them all and they mean a lot to me! 

 I was finishing this up around the time I started this topic but just realized I never posted it! Here's a Triumphant Wes custom done for @SDragonhead.

I made a simple hot glue mold of the face to get the general shape then made a polymer clay cast, smoothing it out ( hot glue molds are a REALLY makeshift method and leaves lots of bumps on your cast ) and sculpting a distorted face akin to Maxwell's as you venture further into adventure mode. This was a little inspired by the 2017 Pennywise makeup as well, especially the cracking in the "makeup". The faces are held in place by magnets, and I also put teensy tiny magnets in the eyes so the plastic/ resin shades I made stay on too. 

EDIT: Apologies, I was a tiny bit tipsy last night ( which is what always prompts me to post stuff, ironically )... this one was commissioned by an Etsy user, Dragon commissioned the Rose Wes. Sorry Dragon!!

Edited November 19, 2018 by MinniBat

[ResettePlayer]

5 hours ago, MinniBat said:

The faces are held in place by magnets, and I also put teensy tiny magnets in the eyes so the plastic/ resin shades I made stay on too.

Clever! Even though I'm not a huge fan of sculpting myself, whenever I see your work, it really makes me want to try. You're inspirational, in other words. Of course, I know you only got this good through years of practice! It certainly has paid off.

[MinniBat]

14 hours ago, ResettePlayer said:

Clever! Even though I'm not a huge fan of sculpting myself, whenever I see your work, it really makes me want to try. You're inspirational, in other words. Of course, I know you only got this good through years of practice! It certainly has paid off.

Thank you so much! But yes, It's taken me years and I still hold myself to a very high standard despite being self-taught. But what got ME into most of the crafting I wanted to do was seeing what other people make too, so no shame in that! There are often even crafts that I used to do but dropped and got back into after seeing how people use them. Hate to sound like That Girl but sites like Pinterest can really be inspiring, especially if you're into stuff like sculpting and miniatures! Lots of ideas you'd never think of.

[minespatch]

That bottom right face is really terrifying. You really got those faces done! Are you planning on doing other figures with interchangeable faces?

The whole face changing reminds me of Nightmare Before Christmas. Behind the scenes, animators shifted faces for both Jack and Sally.

[MinniBat]

1 hour ago, minespatch said:

That bottom right face is really terrifying. You really got those faces done! Are you planning on doing other figures with interchangeable faces?

The whole face changing reminds me of Nightmare Before Christmas. Behind the scenes, animators shifted faces for both Jack and Sally.

Yes! Not Don't Starve related, but I recently got the Genji and Hanzo nendoroids.

( it's an old pic but there's a sneak peak of a DS project in there! )

Nendoroids typically come with three interchangeable faces, but Hanzo came with only two, and Genji just has one solid head piece. I used a similar method ( both with interlocking clay parts rather than magnets, though this is tricky so I may change that ), and cut the front of Genji's head off and adjusted the separate parts as needed, so I now have the original head piece and a human face ( though I'm still fixing up the paint job before adding scars )! Hanzo I only picked up a few days ago but I definitely also wanna make a wider range for him than he came with. I plan to make several more for both.

There are some New Year miniatures I wanted to make to go with them including an osechi and some kadomatsu they have sprays showing in the game, so I'd like to see if it would be possible to make them tiny kimono that aren't too ill-fitting ( small scale can make a fabric seem super bulky ), if not I may even try making extra bodies for them as such. I also have a D.va which I plan to keep but make more stuff for, but I got a Mercy and Tracer for a good price too, but since I don't care too much for either character I'd like to repaint and sell them ( I'd also love to do some Hanzo and D.va ones! But I'd like to keep the original just to look at as well ). Just not sure which skins yet. Either way, being so small and with so many neat little parts, they're a wonderful challenge as far as both repaints and miniature props.

I haven't gotten any more DS figure commissions recently and I haven't had any of my own to paint, plus I do charge a little more for an extra face, but I'd absolutely love doing more innovative stuff with the DS figs. I did make some simple molds of the zombie Wes I have to experiment with, so I'll try out a few new Wes ideas when I have some time. I mentioned wanting to play with LEDs with the clockwork above, maybe I'll see if I can stick some in one. Something dynamic to make up for the lack of articulation on them.

Face replacement is a huge component of stop motion animation! Laika ( Coraline, Boxtrolls, Paranorman, Kubo and the Two Strings ) actually has a system where their faces are split in two at the front, so they can mix and match different eyebrow and mouth pieces. I believe during Paranorman is when they actually started 3D printing the faces since there were so many- in Kubo there were over 48 million different facial combinations among the whole cast! It's grueling, but unparalleled work.

Sorry I drone on so much in some of these responses, I just really love miniatures and stop motion  I often run into people who think they're neat but have no idea where to start with them.

Edited November 19, 2018 by MinniBat