Sarah McIntyre (jabberworks) wrote,
Sarah McIntyre
jabberworks

clay goblin! christmas on dartmoor, part 2

Guess what this is...! It's a GOBLIN! Yes, really! I know, it doesn't look like a goblin, it looks like a space man put together by a four-year-old. When Stuart and I went to the Reeves for Christmas, we brought several boxes of Sculpey clay, wire, cutters and foil. Supposedly they were gifts, but really I was hoping for the chance to make something with them.



Here are Sam, Philip and me being busy bees, while Stuart and Philip's sister and brother-in-law play Monopoly at the other end of the table.



Philip has a fabulous new book coming out in April, called Goblins, and I love the little critters on the cover, drawn by David Semple, so I thought I'd try making one of my own in 3-D. (Find out more about Goblins on Philip's blog.)



Sam made a goblin head, too! It's a fine goblin.



Here's what mine looked like, after I covered all the foil and wire with clay and did some shaping. It still looked like a pig, and I needed to add stuff to make it more goblin-like.



Some armour... Philip gave me some ideas about the kind of armour goblins might wear. Pretty simple stuff, and very bashed-up.




Ah, yes. The helmet needs some height. I was getting a bit obsessive by this point, and the other sculptors had long since packed up their stuff.



The lower shelf in the Aga isn't very hot, it's where people put young lambs and puppies and things when they're too cold in the winter. But we left our goblins in there overnight and that seemed to cook them through.



I started painting my goblin the next day, just the green bits, but there were lots of other exciting things going on around the house, and I was getting a bit frustrated with it, so I didn't finish. But Philip's painted lots of little Warhammer pieces and such, and knows what he's doing, so he took over after I left.



Look, he even made the armour look rusty! Thanks so much, Philip!



Here's the goblin, surveying its domain.



I couldn't get teh clay as smooth as I would have liked, but hey, it's a goblin! They're pretty rough characters. This one has a very bristly tail.



And there were other strange beasties to be discovered around the Reeve Ranch (not just the alpacas). Here's an odd character I found in the shed, which turned out to be a bird-scaring device, created by Philip's dad. Very cool.



A few more Christmas pictures... Oo, you can make dicky bows out of biscuit foil wrappers. How chic!



Sam with bow tie.



Whee, prezzies! Sam's was most elegantly wrapped in The Comix Reader.



And here's the Reeve clan! From right to left, it's Sarah, Philip, Philip's mum, his dad, his sister Marianne, Marianne's partner Howard, and in the front, Sam. Thanks so much for including us in your Christmas!







I'd been talking about wanting to draw on larger paper since I visited Chris Riddell's studio and saw his big sketchbooks, and Philip and Sarah got me a lovely big one, with this inscription. Yay!



Tags: 3d, christmas, dartmoor, reeve
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