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This is about making the Nyx Mini Sculpture, that little entry for Misc Scribbles. I don't have a DevianArt account or anything like that, so I ran it by Tangerine to post here, who turns out wants to liven up this subforum a little bit, so I guess everything works out. Eye candy first: I began by picking a scale. It is important to keep in mind that Nyx has stunted growth, so whatever scale is decided upon, she will still be even smaller than usual. I used the proportions from this tutorial as the template. In a photo editor, I lined up the front and side proportions. Then I made multiple sizes of them, printing out a whole bunch, to get a sense of scale in real life. After consideration, I have opted for the sculpture to be 1.75 inches tall. A sculpture of her at 1.75 inches would make her just about 5 feet 1 inch tall in 1:35 scale, a common military model scale, and a reasonable life-size height for Nyx. The game itself is inconsistent with exact heights anyway. After settling on a pose, I then loosely followed this guy's method of making a small scale armature. Some changes were made to accomodate Nyx's smaller size. I stripped the plastic from the wire because the limbs with the plastic would have been too thick. I also only followed the wire steps, none of the other steps involving the cardboard and glue. Nyx is too small for me to bother with those steps. I timestamped the first step just in case I needed to prove I began within the contest time frame. The sculpture will be made primarily with Fimo clay. I chose polymer clay over epoxy because I did not want to be limited by any curing time. Polymer clay pretty much stays malleable until you bake it. I chose Fimo because it has a lower bake temperature than Sculpey, to minimize the chance of melting any extra material I may decide to add later on. The workstand thingy is just some pair of random nylon picture wall hangers being held together by a screw and some wingnuts. Most Nylon seem to have a higher melting point than the baking temperature of the Fimo, according to their MSDS, so I figured it's fine (and turns out it was fine.) One problem with polymer clay is that it adheres poorly to wire. Watching this guy on YouTube, apparently you need a layer of Green Stuff (it's a two part epoxy clay) in between. Basically, the wire provides good surface for the Green Stuff to stick, and then the Green Stuff provides a good surface for the polymer clay to stick. I followed that YouTube guy pretty extensively in the making of this sculpture, but I have to be extra careful to apply as thin a layer of Green Stuff as possible because my armature is made of twin wires. On the other hand the uneven surfaces of the twin wires were enough to make the Green Stuff stick, so I did not need to roughen the surfaces with a file. Green Stuff sticks to everything when it is initially mixed, including tools. I applied a thin layer of mineral oil (baby oil) on the tools and my disposable gloves, although people online usually use their own spit and bare hands. That's kind of gross, and I already had mineral oil and gloves anyway, so I went ahead and used them. The Green Stuff is so sticky that this is as thinly as I could have applied it. Before it hardens, I spread a thin layer of Fimo on the Green Stuff just like the tutorials teach. Then the bulking up begins. It will never be visible when finished, but adding individual major muscles helped me keep track of which places require more bulk. People like to avoid focusing on one area too much because it might make that area disproportionate with the rest of the sculpture. I pretty much ignored that practice to focus on the legs to make sure they aren't lopsided. I used some cheap drug store dental tools as sculpting tools, and dipped them in mineral oil so that any clay would be more prone to stick to the sculpture. After the legs are done, I moved my focus upward until the torso was done too. Then the arms were next. Individual fingers were rolled and stuck to the back of the hand. At this point I have accidentally bumped and deformed the legs a few times already, so after fixing them again I decided to bake the sculpture to harden the clay... ...which led to tragedy. The sculpture was bumped again and this time a thumb and finger snapped off. Attaching them proved difficult, there was not enough area for the clay to properly glue them back on. They look real flimsy and there was no way they would even survive posing a book on them. Plus the whole thing just plain looked bad. I decided to break them off and use Green Stuff to make finger placeholders. Green Stuff can be flexible after drying if you mix less hardener. This way they will bend first unless they were bumped too hard, and even then they were only placeholders. Also, the face and nose were sculpted. Finishing the basic sculpting was done relatively quickly, and the fingers were then removed and replaced with Liquid Green Stuff. It is a completely different product, not a clay. It is a goop that dries into a hard solid. It can be applied by paint brush. Here I formed the fingers using Liquid Green Stuff by touching a goop onto the hand using a paint brush, then slowly pulling away to form a finger. The Liquid Green Stuff also works as a gap filler, I thinned it with water and brushed it onto the sculpture to fill any unwanted gaps between the clay (which are all baked now) that have been there until now. It will dry rough, but that is not a problem because I was going to sand the sculpture's unwanted bumps smooth anyway. The colored sheets in the background are the Testor sand papers I was going to use. It is easy to see where the Liquid Green Stuff filled any gaps. I also used some to add some bulk in the back. Some fingers on the other hand broke off too, but at this point I didn't really need placeholder fingers anymore, so I just remade them directly. The next thing I moved on to was the cape. It is not made of paper, these are just templates. I found a random lid with a close enough curvature and traced it. Tamiya masking tape was used to hold the cape templates to the sculpture, to see how it would look. I will post more of the progress later, this post is getting long.