My entry this was inspired by 'Fall of The Rebel Angels' by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. I find his varied and wild depictions of all kinds of loathsome creatures quite interesting. I also liked the more outlandish depictions of such mythological scenes, they often have layered and perhaps even busy compositions. Which can express multiple facets of a given subject or concept and also contain them within the continuity of a single image.

The concept here is how would being expelled from a higher existence affect a spiritual being.

Forced down into earthly trappings, saturated and afflicted by the impurity of the material world.

The sculpt itself is mostly Das clay of all things, it being at a larger scale, about 54mm scale I think. Even in the seated pose its approximately 6cm from the top side of the base to the top the head, this size makes paper clay like Das viable. Though getting a good finish on paper clay at this still small scale is difficult but it does take well to carving and sending and given the subject matter a smooth finish may not be in keeping with the themes. In terms of the bash part of smash bash, the body was primarily made from a clam shell I moulded and reproduced in paper clay. The limbs (and neck) and basic gesture was fleshed out with Das then carved and sanded down to get the right kind of shapes. The head, hands and feet were all made with milliput. I then tried to take a leaf out of your book with the oil paints. I do have some but I opted instead to use Golden Open slow-drying acrylics which I usually reserve for more standard fine art practices. They do however have great pigmentation, good coverage but also fairly low opacity somehow unless applied quite thickly or with mediums. I thinned them a little with water and layered up loose wet on wet layers. I came in after with vallejo model colour to refine a few things on the hands and feet, mostly to push the values. Then came the unenviable task of applying feathers, there was notable trial and error involved and even took applying a second layer I will spare you the details. What I can say for now is that I used seagull feathers for the body and magpie for the “hair”. Now the that subtle colour reflection in the magpie feathers seems to have been lost in the process however, the black in them carried through nicely.

The base is fairly unadorned, it does use a cast of the shield I made for the Simpso Shield Slam and also a cast part of the elrikwing rider from the Osmotic Mold kickstarter. I though the ‘hell mouth’ style imagery would be appropriate for this base.