General Kass! (2.7 MB of pictures. No joke.)

Post finished and unfinished work here for critique and appraisal.
Wingsrising
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General Kass! (2.7 MB of pictures. No joke.)

Post by Wingsrising »

For the Winter 2006 Olympics, a well-known knitting blogger (yes, they make those) proposed the 2006 Knitting Olympics. Every particpant had to choose a project that would be a challenge to complete in the 16 days that the Olympics ran. They couldn't start before the flames were lit and had to finish before the flames were extinguished. Cool, huh?

I didn't happen to have a suitable project in the works (there was stuff I had yarn for but couldn't possibly do in 16 days, and stuff I could do but didn't have yarn for, but not both.) So I decided to hold my own private sculpting Olympics instead, and finish a project that has long been hanging over my head.

You hear that? Off in the distance? That's the sound of Hell freezing over.

At any rate, when we left our hero 2 forums and over a year and a half ago (hey, I was busy, what with two moves, totalling and buying a car, finding a job, and oh yeah, proposing, researching, writing, and defending my dissertation) he looked something like this. Handsome, with a dapper coat, but (sadly) hairless and wingless:

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The next step was the wings. This, frankly, is the OTHER reason I had been putting off starting him for so long (not that my dissertation isn't a worthy excuse.) The wings were going to be a nightmare and I knew it. I really liked the effect that my bf had gotten in the 4' paper mache gryphon we made together, which he achieved by cutting out every single bleeping feather individually. I wanted to do something similar with Kass' flight feathers, but I knew it was going to be a bitch.

I was right, too.

My original plan was to build the individual wing feathers on little individually-cut wire mesh supports. (Although I planned to bake the feathers before attaching, baked polymer clay softens in the oven if you bake the piece again. So the feathers would droop when I baked the hair and the rest of the wings without some sort of internal support.) I got as far as cutting a bunch of the dang things out before I realised that feather-sized bits of mesh weren't sturdy enough to support the weight of a clay feather. So I took a tip from a book by a prominant poly clay artist, Katherine Dewey, and instead cut the feathers out of card stock. Then I coated the cardstock with Superglue to give it strength. The superglue I used wasn't especially quick-drying, but it did have fumes. Superglue high, yay! (Well, more of a headache, really. But it was too cold to do it outside.)

Then I got to roll out strips of poly clay with my pasta machine and cut bits to fit each of the little card feathers: lavendar on one side, purple on the other.

I sort of like this picture because you can see three stages of the process. Some feathers already coated on one side are sitting in the bag (to protect from collecting dust), some of the card armatures are off to the right, and in front one of the feathers is in the process of being cut out of the clay.
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Sadly, I didn't take any pictures of the feathers coated on both sides. They didn't look much like feathers and weren't going to until I textured them, the next step. Besides simply giving them texture, I sculpted little "splits" on the edges of each feather. Thinking about it, that's a little silly. Kass surely preens himself (especially when dressing in such a snazzy uniform) and part of preening is zipping up the splits in the feathers. But the feathers look a lot more like, well, feathers with those small irregularities in them.

Here's a pile of feathers fresh from the oven. I kept track and it took me around 15 mintues to texture and "split" each feather. There were 22 feathers. This may give you some idea why I was dreading the wings so much. Why can't I have been a fan of wolves or dolphins or something featherless?

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Ahem. Now the real fun began: attaching the feathers to the wires protruding from Kass' shoulderblades. I wrapped some wire mesh around the wires and becan clipping the bits of card embedded in the feather to them with binder clips, in preperation for coating them with more superglue to stiffen and bind the wing together.

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That sounds so easy, huh? Trust me, it wasn't. Trying to arrange the feathers to look astheticly pleasing and natural was work. IIRC, it took me around an hour and a half to arrange them all (while watching a figure skating event, I think... almost all of this stuff was done during figure skating, the events between the skating, and episodes of Highlander.) After arranging them, it was time to (carefully) glue. I had used up most of the first bottle of superglue coating the card for the feathers, and I had bought a new bottle of a different brand. This brand was less fumey (thank goodness) but more agressive: it dried very quickly, as superglue normally does. Overall this was good, as I never could have kept the feathers in place for a long period of time while the glue dried. It did, however, have the downside that I kept gluing things to things they shouldn't be glued to: binderslips to the wing, tools to feathers, myself to myself, and once, myself to the feathers. Thank God for nail polish remover.

For the sake of room, I shall leave off the "gluing finished" pictures (though I have some in my LJ) and move right along to making the wing coverts (the feathers that cover the primary feathers.) I was hoping they would take one night. They took three.

Making the coverts was in principle straightforward. Each set of coverts had been broken into two pieces (roughly the primary and secondary coverts) and I needed 4 sets (one each for the upper- and underside of each wing.) I would roll out clay of the appropriate color in the pasta machine, then for each piece I'd cut out a shape using templates I'd made before I quit working on Kass in 2004. I'd sculpt the feathers in so that they actually looked like overlapping feathers, then texture them and make the splits in the edges. Then I'd do some quick texturing to the bits of the wing above the secondaries. Last, I'd apply them to the wire mesh on the wings.

I wish this picture had come out better. It's meant to show the steps in making one of the primary covert bits. The upper feathers are still just flat clay. In the middle I've cut the feathers in so they look like they're overlapping. Towards the bottom they're textured. The very bottom feather is both textured and split and I think even in the crappy picture you can see the improvement splitting gives over texturing alone.

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That's all well and good, but besides being time-consuming, I had forgotten minor details. The template was flat. Kass' wings were cupped. That meant the underside was smaller than the template (and I needed to work out how everything should overlap) and the upperside was larger (meaning I needed to sculpt extra feathers as the peices wouldn't fit):

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(The plastic wrap is to keep dust off the wing I wasn't working on: the underside on that side was already done.)

Also, I'd splayed (for lack of a better term) the primaries quite a bit, especially on the left side: they no longer made a smooth curve with the rest of the wing. It looked cool but meant the flat sheets the coverts were made from looked like, well, flat sheets stuck to the wings instead of part of the wing. I had to go back and cut into the covert-sheets in several places to make them less flat, before I was satisfied. This meant sculpting the feathers underneath the cuts (the feathers overlapped, so cutting along an overlapping edge meant there was only a partial feather next to it, which needed to be completed) while the coverts were attached to the rather wobbly surface of the wings. It was annoying, but I prevailed:

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You can see the "splayed" primaries on Kass' left wing very well here.

At last, the wings were complete. On to the hair, which luckily was a much easier prospect. Sculping the hair was mostly easy and fun and done during ladies' figure skating. The main issues were making the braids (I ended up actually rolling fine snakes of clay during the long program and really braiding them, which looked nice but was a bit of a pain) and Kass' hairline. In the press kit image of Kass I was basing the sculpture on, Kass' mane clearly goes up to somewhere between his ears. Actually doing his mane like this looked nice from every angle EXCEPT where you could see the actual "hairline" -- having it so far back made it look like Kass was balding. Oops. I had to do some experimentation to get a happy medium between giving Kass a normal human hairline (clearly inappropriate for an Eyrie) and making him look like Jean-Luc Picard.

Kass looks much more badass with hair.

I was originally planning on using paint on the beak, cere, and pupils of the eyes. However, the beak has always looked a wee bit small to me, so I beefed it up by coating with with black clay. Then I figured, why not do the eyes by applying bits of clay as well? The catchlights took a bit of experimentation: white clay seemed too bright. A ligher red than the eyeballs was more the ticket. Last, I decided to leave the cere (the bit of skin above the beak) as is, when I decided lavendar was too bright and I didn't want to introduce another color to the sculpture.

Kass's head before the second bake:
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After I added the hair, I re-did the cheeks so that they clearly overlapped the hair. In this image, you can see where I've added the clay for the cheeks. The purple clay darkens when baked, so the unbaked additions are lighter than the rest of the head.)

I also added Kass' coat of arms to the front of the base:
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Now for Kass' third and final baking, a long and anxious time (performed Sunday during the closing ceremony). He barely fit in my oven (heightwise) and I baked him for over an hour, taking him out every so often to let the oven heat (I didn't like having him in with the heating elements on) and to drape thin already-baked bits (like the primaries, ears, and top of the head) with wet paper towels to protect them from scorching.

But he survived.

Last but not least, earrings! The earrings are gold-filled jump rings. I had managed to partially cover one of the holes in his ears when I applied the hair, but I squeezed them in OK (though one of them had fallen out in one of the pictures here.) I also glued back on a few missing buttons and Kass' sword Narilus, which had fallen off during the second baking.

Then I had to wait a few days until I had time to take pictures in natural light. They're still not as good as they could be, but I don't want to wait any longer to show him off. :-) (He still looks better in person, though.)

Many pictures of Kass:
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Phew.

I have to admit, doing all this (and looking through the old "work in progress" pictures) is re-kindling my desire to do more anthro-gryphon sculptures. At one time I'd considered doing a sculpture of Tastefully Nude Kass -- though I love his clothes, he looked pretty good before I covered him with his jacket, too. (As some of you may or may not remember, I roughed him out naked before applying the clothes: the standard wisdom is that the clothes won't look right unless there's a nude form underneath.) I even have a decent idea of what pose I'd use. Maybe I'll do it one of these days (with folded wings this time, which famous-last-words should be easier to make).

But not before I've done the huge backlog of cleaning, cooking, laundry, etc. I let build up while I was working on Kass.

Come to think of it, judging by the dates on the old picture files, I started him sometime around Feb 24 of last year, which means I finished just over two years from when I started.

Though the old forum is no more, I *think* I saved most of my original Work In Progress posts to my old computer's hard drive before posting them, and of course I still have all the pictures. If there's geneal interest I can *try* to dig them out and either re-post them here or post them to a webpage.

That's all, folks.
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Ziggy
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Post by Ziggy »

I always remember thinking this was fantastic. My attempts at sculpting are usually failures. I probably should practise more though.
ICKessler
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Post by ICKessler »

Wow, that came out amazingly. I remember when you started it, thinking it was a pretty damn ambitious project, I didn't know you hadn't completed it. Congratulations on wrapping up your masterpiece! The details are... magnetic. I just want to look at all the little bits and pieces.

Can I come over to your house and pick it up and fiddle with it? ;)

It's great. And the wings came out marvelously.
Monkeyguy
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Post by Monkeyguy »

Yay! I've been waiting to see the finished product for so long. I'm totally impressed as well, you are so talented. *Hops around his house in joy*
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jeti
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Post by jeti »

I still have the old thread listed in my favourites, if that's any indication of how amazing I think this is. :3 I'm in awe over all the detailing. Awe awe awe. *covets*
Float
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Post by Float »

Thats amazing. There is so much detail, and the birds eye view is nice I didn't even see how cool the wings bent. *claps*
Cheese
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Post by Cheese »

You finished it \o/

Finally \o/

It's wonderful. I'm really happy you finished it.

I hate unfinished work. I hate having things I've started go unfinished unless they were too hard and I just quit. I'm sure it was bothering me somewhere in my mind that you hadn't finished this :p especially because it's so good.
TCD
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Post by TCD »

Ooooooh. Coolness.

Question, cuz I don't remember the old thread, how big is he? Height wise, I mean. Can't really tell from the pictures.
le_diable_blanc
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Post by le_diable_blanc »

Wow that's some impressive work and it looks fantastic. Big congrats on your achievement!
AngharadTy
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Post by AngharadTy »

Yayyy he's so good! Hee, and obviously recognizable; Derek looked over and said, "Is that.. General... Kass?"

So, you win.
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Umbreonmog
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Post by Umbreonmog »

Oh wow, he's gorgeous. He's so detailed. If this were a mass produced figurine I would snap it up in a heartbeat. The wings are my favorite part. And so is the head. And his legs. And his jacket. Hell, I like all of him. Are you going to submit it to the Art Gallery? It'd be a crime if he didn't get in.
Hoofs
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Post by Hoofs »

Holy Hell! Thats amazing and beautifully done!
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Aurinona
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Post by Aurinona »

Wow, that's amazing! Incredible detail- and thanks for showing how you did the wings! I may have to try that technique sometime.

Do you have any pictures of the paper mache gryphon you mentioned? :)
Trick
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Post by Trick »

Wow, that is absolutely incredible - the detail is amazing! O____O

Huge congratulations on completing it and just... wow, amazing work :D
Jazzy
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Post by Jazzy »

It just...wow. Definitely a wonderful knitting olympics project (I also bowed out of that, but I didn't manage anything amazing in the time like you did).
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