IRWT secret santa 2024

fantasy blade creature

The In Rust We Trust discord runs a secret santa every year, where each entrant gives a 3 word prompt for a kitbash to be made for them. I entered this year to try and build up some hobby motivation, here is the process of making my fantasy blade creature.

The first step for me was to put together a mood board of the kind of vibes I was going for. I knew I wanted to make a beast sort of creature, and it needed blades. Looking at these sculpures I came to blade legs, so started to think about what I might be able to use to get the shape. I have never scratch built any miniatures before, so this was a new experience for me!

I found these toothpicks and thought they looked great for the legs.

 There wasn't much of a plan here, and in hindsight I definitely would have been better off to plan the pose, but I was having a lot of fun! The toothpicks looked exactly how I wanted them to, and the shape of the guy was starting to get quite creepy.

 

 

This is the full model with the foil and toothpicks all in place, the foil was going to act as an skeleton to build up onto with other materials in future. The toothpicks looks great, I was definitely concerned about how it was going to stand up at this point, but that was a problem for another day. All of this was glued together with superglue and baking soda to bulk it up and make the connections stronger.

 Unfortunately it doesn't look like I took many pictures for this stage of the process, but basically the first step was some green stuff blobs to build up some mass in areas I missed with the foil and getting the shapes closer to where I wanted them to be. I covered all the foil with texture paste as I didn't really have time to sculpt proper skin/flesh/fur and this got the kinda gross effect that I wanted. I added the sticks in his back to look closer to one of the reference pictures in the original mood board. Finally, I stuck a little section of a collar around his neck. I knew I wanted some kind of creepy mask or muzzle but had not yet decided how I wanted that to look.

Again this feels like a big jump - the first small change here is that I added some corrosion paint to the tops of the leg blades to blend the texture from the smooth plastic to the very rough texture paste. I added a muzzle in the form of a coffee stirrer snapped into lengths and glued around the head into a cone shaped mask. This looks really creepy and I love how it worked out. It was a bit tricky to get glued into place, but superglue and baking soda works every time. I added some green stuff ribbons, flattened to look like straps around the muzzle and two of the legs for additional detail. I also felt that I needed something to give a sense of scale, for such an abstract object. To do this I added a pair of arrows that had been shot into its flank - giving a point of reference.

 In order to make the base line up to the creatures wonky feet, I made the shape with foil referencing constantly to the creatures feet. Following that I made a thin layer of green stuff and pressed a rock into it for texture, then I pressed the blade legs in to make sure it all lined up. This way when it cured, I knew where he would sit.

I added loads of things to the base! stones, texture paste, baking soda, fine sand, cork and a skeleton torso and head that i'm actually really pleased with the posing on.

And it is finished!! I am really pleased with how this came out, and I hope my recipeint likes it. This was the first time I have finished a project in a while, so it felt really nice to get it done. There was no requirement to have this guy painted, but if I were to paint it I would have done gross glossy blood like exposed muscle on the majority.

While I am here, I would love to take a moment to show off what I recieved in the secret santa as well from Dom (TheVVizard). My prompt was folk-horror, effigy, masked.

Thanks Dom, what a treat.