barbquebutt
Active Member
Since making gifts seems to be the only thing that motivates me to build lately, I'm working on a sculpt of the First Blade from Supernatural as a gift for my dad's birthday/Father's Day.
I bought him a book that I later found out wasn't going to ship until October, so I was just going to give him a print out of the book description and call it good. Luckily, my family pushed his birthday/Father's Day celebration back a week, which gave me some extra time to come up with something.
We're both big fans of Supernatural and he always thought the First Blade looked cool, so I came up with this with only a few days to spare and my plan is to give this to him 4 days from now. Doesn't give me a ton of time to perfect and fine-tune the sculpt, but luckily it's supposed to look like bone, so it's a bit forgiving.
Anyway, here's my work so far.
I started out with a trip to Hobby Lobby. I knew I wanted to have a solid core for the knife, but I couldn't think of what to use. I happened past the wooden letters and found that the parallels of an MDF letter "H" were just about the right size for the handle and blade, and the serifs would make a good foundation for the flares of the bone.
I cut the parts with a jigsaw, and then super glued them together. I was going to use wood glue, but I didn't have time for it to dry and couldn't think of a good way to clamp the pieces. Plus, the whole thing is getting coated in clay anyway, so it didn't have to be a super strong bond. I then realized that I glued the handle on backwards, so I snapped it off and glued it on again.
Never used Sculpey before (weird right?), but I knew that since I was going to be handling it a lot while working on it, I needed something that was going to be a little more resilient than normal clay. I thought about using the firm Sculpey, but decided that was a little too firm, so I went with just regular Super Sculpey.
I started with the pommel to work on my bone sculpting technique on a smaller area. It took some time to get just the right shape I was looking for, but I got there eventually. I was pretty impressed with myself.
Once I was satisfied with the pommel, I built up the handle and guard. I didn't spend a ton of time on the handle since it's ultimately going to be wrapped in leather, so I just gave it a basic shape and called it good. Since there's no real fine detail there, it also makes a good place to prop it up so the actual detail work doesn't get flattened when I have to set it down.
Next, I started building up and roughing out the blade and the teeth. I think I'm gonna work on the teeth some more, because while they look like real donkey teeth in my opinion (the First Blade was fashioned from a donkey jawbone), they don't quite match the actual show prop. I'll see what I can do.
And here's where I finished last night. When I get home I'll finish building up the blade and then start doing some detail work.
Stay tuned for more updates.
I bought him a book that I later found out wasn't going to ship until October, so I was just going to give him a print out of the book description and call it good. Luckily, my family pushed his birthday/Father's Day celebration back a week, which gave me some extra time to come up with something.
We're both big fans of Supernatural and he always thought the First Blade looked cool, so I came up with this with only a few days to spare and my plan is to give this to him 4 days from now. Doesn't give me a ton of time to perfect and fine-tune the sculpt, but luckily it's supposed to look like bone, so it's a bit forgiving.
Anyway, here's my work so far.
I started out with a trip to Hobby Lobby. I knew I wanted to have a solid core for the knife, but I couldn't think of what to use. I happened past the wooden letters and found that the parallels of an MDF letter "H" were just about the right size for the handle and blade, and the serifs would make a good foundation for the flares of the bone.
I cut the parts with a jigsaw, and then super glued them together. I was going to use wood glue, but I didn't have time for it to dry and couldn't think of a good way to clamp the pieces. Plus, the whole thing is getting coated in clay anyway, so it didn't have to be a super strong bond. I then realized that I glued the handle on backwards, so I snapped it off and glued it on again.
Never used Sculpey before (weird right?), but I knew that since I was going to be handling it a lot while working on it, I needed something that was going to be a little more resilient than normal clay. I thought about using the firm Sculpey, but decided that was a little too firm, so I went with just regular Super Sculpey.
I started with the pommel to work on my bone sculpting technique on a smaller area. It took some time to get just the right shape I was looking for, but I got there eventually. I was pretty impressed with myself.
Once I was satisfied with the pommel, I built up the handle and guard. I didn't spend a ton of time on the handle since it's ultimately going to be wrapped in leather, so I just gave it a basic shape and called it good. Since there's no real fine detail there, it also makes a good place to prop it up so the actual detail work doesn't get flattened when I have to set it down.
Next, I started building up and roughing out the blade and the teeth. I think I'm gonna work on the teeth some more, because while they look like real donkey teeth in my opinion (the First Blade was fashioned from a donkey jawbone), they don't quite match the actual show prop. I'll see what I can do.
And here's where I finished last night. When I get home I'll finish building up the blade and then start doing some detail work.
Stay tuned for more updates.
