Creating A monster

Today marks the start of the creation of the "Blackout" creature dubbed "Nessie". With the arrival of a majority of my tools and equipment, i began construction of the armatures skeleton.

Starting with the creature designed by the previous level 6 student, i had enlarged his concept art to the definative size of the armature and then cut a piece of flexible copper. i than shaped it to the concept design from the head to the tip of its tail.

In doing this, i was able to mark with a permanent marker where to attach the legs and mouth joint along with where extras can be attached from (I.e tail fin, horns).

once the legs are marked out i had discovered a way to attach them to the main piece from a combination of industrial grade glue and sodium bicarbonate, which glues metal together. The trickiest area to make for the base was the head as i had to make the top of the head, the top of the jaw as well as the bottom from thinner copper wire My issue with this part especially is that the sodium glue combination was not working for some reason on the thinner copper, so i resorted to welding these peices together with solder and a blowtorch. another addition i did to the structrure was make two pretruding areas so when it comes to bulking up the armature, i can wrap the foam around the area.

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with the legs and head area attached, i had to know create the "bones" of the creature itself as i didnt want specific areas of the strure to move around. to create the bones i combined normal modelling clay with epoxy to create something that will set hard as stone and will stick to the metal. with that made i applied it to the areas i didnt want to move finally ending in my armature looking like a skeleton.

​​SMLXL