Massive Darkness: Overseer

This is it, my last figure I sculpted for the game, the Overseer. When I saw some of the posts in the KS comments section wanting a Beholder-like figure I was snickering to myself. Something you should know is that I went way off-base with this guy as he wasn't even on, "The List." When looking over what the GG crew wanted I noticed there wasn't anything like a beholder-ish creature in there and I thought that would be a fun creature to have in a dungeon crawl game. So I decided to add this guy into my sculpting roster and see what Guillotine Games said about it. Again, it's a figure of my design and also, one that was not requested.

I've never been a fan of the original art of the beholder but I liked the concept. As years have gone by there have been plenty of artists who have done their rendition of the monster which have helped me appreciate the strangeness of the creature and assist in portraying it's general creepiness. I wanted to redesign it and make it more hopefully unique to the game.

Insectile mandibles instead of a slitted mouth, a crustacean carapace of natural armor and eyes everywhere helped make it stand apart but the tentacles were kind of a necessity and proved to be a hang-up point in getting this figure done. They guy was supposed to be floating but I was pretty sure the production crew could not do transparent floating stands just for one figure and sculpting some kind of effect to simulate flying sounded like a potential nightmare so the addition of tentacles seemed a necessity. I had done a set of them based off of a Portuguese Man O War but they looked terrible! Once I had all the tentacles on and got a good look in it's entirety I got very frustrated. This didn't look at all like what I was going for so I had to set it down for a couple of weeks while I worked on the other figures and thought about it.

Once I had a chance to look it over again I realized there was too much mass below the sphere of the body, it lost it's floating theme I was trying for and instead looked like it was balancing on a pile of tubes so I drank a bit of vodka to get up the courage to go after the figure with knife and cut them all off. Once that was done I restricted the tentacles to only three primary tendrils to balance on with a couple of smaller ones tucked around the bigger. This helped a lot in keeping the mass of the figure up high in the sphere where I needed it to be. After that I was much more happy with the sculpt; it had a touch of weightlessness, it had motion and it looked alien. The GG crew said they liked it and it got sent off.

What I really enjoy about the character is the write up they did for it (which I just saw today)

I thought this was an awesome idea and very I'm happy with the concept of it's origins and the art is great too!

Here are the pictures for the final sculpt...

One last note: since you cannot see it, under its mandibles there is a sucker-like mouth opening. I didn't envision this guy chewing his food but rather using these articulated mouth-parts to scoop and stuff food into it's orifice. Fun.

There he is, the last of my contributions to this project. Hope you have fun playing it and enjoy fighting the beasts!

Massive Darkness: Lord Tusk

OK. I will admit it, I was sick when I did this. And I mean physically, not mentally. I had a pretty nasty head-cold and was wacky on the antihistamines and full-on lack of sleep. On top of that I was  away from home so I was sculpting on the fly but luckily I had a little bit of everything I needed to get him done. This guy was on the list GG sent me and was just named as, "Ogre."

Again, free-form sculpting with this one and considering my condition probably more so then normal. I remember I had made the smaller cleaver first, thought it too small, sculpted a bigger one and made it look as though he was leaning on it. Then, somewhere along the way I decided to use the cleaver I already had made and put it in his other hand because... I guess I thought he needed it? Right? I don't know, maybe he throws the smaller one first and uses the bigger two handed... Or maybe he's just that bad ass?

I had started the Cyclops Spear Maiden already but had to leave it at home since it was in no condition to travel so I worked on this guy instead. He was the second to be started for the project but the first to get done (and smallest) and I was sure that once I sent pictures off to the GG crew there was going to be a lot of, "What were you thinking?" comments. I had even began preparing a new armature for a re-sculpt in expectation of them wanting something a bit less over the top but they liked him and requested more. I wouldn't say I was delusional when I sculpted this one but fairly loopy for a while and semi confused with what I did when I got better so if you are wondering why I did it like this, your not the only one. The awesome picture the artist drew of my sculpt made me feel better about it all though.

Massive Darkness: Hellephant (AKA: Kevin)

This guy just got unlocked so here's my post about it: This is another one of my designs and was part of a list of proposed figures for the game that had been sent to me from the GG crew. With only the description of, "3-armed ogre" I had quite the leeway with the design and I'm sure this figure, like several other of the sculpts they let me be creative with, was not at all what the guys at Guillotine Games were expecting.

I had pondered how I wanted to approach it and bounced around with ideas of an ogre with two arms on one side and one big one on the other but I was worried that it would just look like everything else I've sculpted with an extra arm sprouting out of it's armpit. I was suddenly taken by the idea of an elephant-type of creature and immediately remembered issue #4 of Conan the Barbarian where he meets an alien being named Yag-Kosha who was trapped and tortured in a wizards tower. The imagery had stuck with me from early childhood when I used to read my dads comic collection since I thought the idea of an man-elephant was an odd idea for an alien. Then there was Chaugnar Faugn from the Lovecraft Circle of writing that bought up some interesting ideas for inspiration. With that in mind I began sculpting and saw where it took me.

Usually when I get to sculpt like this I can add or discard ideas as I go since I'm not beholden to any artwork. With only a general idea of the overall look I got to have fun with the design and try to create something unique for the game. I didn't want it to look just like an anthropomorphize pachyderm and felt it needed to appear more alien; more like this species had a resemblance to an elephant rather then an elephant that mutated, if that makes sense. The "trunk" became more of a tentacle arm with claws that roughly resembled his hands with the over-sized central claw detail carrying over all three arms. Midway sculpting the face I changed my mind and what were originally going to be tusks became more like mandibles. I also decided to change the idea of teeth and instead sculpted a beak like a squid's, with an extra set of eyes and ears added to the overall strangeness. A spiky back, elongated cranium, freakishly long arms and a squat frame helped to make it look less human.

Something that surprised even me, which is odd since I'm the one sculpting it, the clothes ended up becoming more elegant then a lot of the other roaming creatures in the game (hopefully) giving it a feeling of intelligence and hinting at it's own culture. It has a lack of forged weapons as I had originally thought of him as a monk-type of fighter, (hence the Shaolin style brass rings on his wrists,) but he could also easily be some kind of arcane spell caster... Or both? I didn't know just what the GG crew had planned for the 3-armed ogre but I figure they would find some place to fit it in if they decided to use the sculpt.

So there you have it, love it or hate it, another one of my attempts at creating a new race that breaks away from the Tolkien or D&D tropes of fantasy creatures but not TOO far as I didn't want to alienate people, rather challenge their imaginations. I guess we'll see how it is accepted. Again, the artwork was based off of my sculpt after it was done and my thanks to the artist.

BTW, the nicknames of "Kevin" for this guy and "Bob" for the nightmare Thing were given to them by the GG crew.

GURPS Atomic Horror: 1993

In 1993 Steve Jackson Games released a supplement to their GURPS line of games called "Atomic Horror." This book was to allow players a chance to have adventures in the B-grade movie style of sci-fi genre that were popular during post WWII. For those who don't know the game, GURPS stands for "Generic Universal Roll-Playing System" and was a set of rules flexible enough that could allow game masters and players the freedom to create their own settings with supplement books like this to help out with both specific parameters for the rules and inspirational material for adventures.

Why am I even talking about this? Because this was my first paying job as an artist in a genuine publicized and distributed format. But keep in mind, I was not THE artist of the book. Turns out that David Plunkett (who is THE artist of the book) was a neighbor of mine back in my old home town and at the time he was working on this project. I was a wannabe comic artist and he asked me to help out with meeting his deadline for Steve Jackson Games. He gave me 5 pages that he had roughed-out in pencil that I was to clean-up and detail for him so that he could ink them. I was to get $10 per page and I had about a week to get them done. I accomplished my task and Dave was good to his word and I got $50 for my effort and trust me, I was ecstatic! No joke, I was seriously thrilled just to get to be involved with it. Plus the $50 was a big deal since I was working a minimum wage job at the time which in '92 was something like $4.25 an hour.

I had asked Dave if it was possible to get my name in the book somewhere and he said that he would let the publisher know about my assistance but no promises. About a half-a-year later Dave gave me a free copy of the book when it got released, he was unable to get my name in it but I was still pretty happy about it all. About 2 weeks later I had my first, (of many,) geek-surreal moments when I visited my local hobby shop and saw the book on the new release rack. It was so odd to see something I had worked on right along side all the other gaming books. It's a feeling I still get now whenever I see one of my figures out in the wild or on someones gaming table and I don't think I'll ever get used to it. Not sure I want to either.

A few months ago I was looking through some of my art books I have on my shelves and ran across my old copy of Atomic Horror and for the slightest fraction of a second I couldn't remember why I had this lone GURPS book wedged in there, and suddenly it all came back to me. I opened it up and saw Dave's autograph on the first page and began to think of everything that's happened since then with my vocation and how fluke-ish my life has been in general. Dave's went off in it's own direction too, if you feel up to it stop by his website: http://www.artbyplunkett.com/

Thanks Dave! And I'm sorry I stuck you with getting Hitler's face right for his moon landing. (P-102)

Massive Darkness: Spearmaiden Cyclops

This is one of my designs and the first figure for the Massive Darkness project I began work on, (but not the first to get finished.) GG had been given a list of monsters they would like to see made but after that it was up to me as far as aesthetics go, I had been provided concept art for the hero figures and some of the monster to give me an idea of what they were wanting but I must admit, I think I may have disturbed some of the crew with this figure after I sprung it on them.

I've been the, "big monster guy" for a long time now and what I've noticed is that I am usually asked to do heavily muscled, steroid infused masculine figures, and rarely do I see anything that resembles female unless it's in a battle bikini and is less monstrous and more like someones fantasy dream woman. I wanted to make sure the game had unique and memorable figures so I decided to make a real fem-beast for the project; unwaxed and unshaven hair and all.

I tried to make the armor look more functional and worn out of necessity rather then an attempt to accentuate the female form... Mostly. Those parts I did choose to accentuate seem to add to the creep factor rather then make it look like something you'd want to take out for an evening. Also, for some reason I got stuck on the logistics of giants and giant sized weapons in an enclosed dungeon, (I know, why bother?) so I gave the figure what I thought would be most effective in that kind of environment; a spear for jabbing and range with a big shield to block off the passage with. I kind of figured running into something like that preventing your progress would be a real pain to get around, whether this is reflected in the rules or not is up to the game designers but I have a feeling it's going to be a mighty duel regardless.

Another fun part of this project is that the art that was done for the game was made based upon my sculpts, not the other way around so it's always a thrill to see stuff like this. Here is the post-sculpt art as well as the pics for the figure...

Massive Darkness: Nightmare Thing (AKA: Bob)

Bob has a tiny bit of a story behind his creation. Mr. Raphael Guiton know s that I love John Carpenters "The Thing" so when the artists were commissioned to do some of the games concepts he had requested them to render this with me specifically in mind. This was also a figure I did without sending progress pictures off to the crew simply because, well, what would I show? Any picture I sent would be confusing since it had nothing like it to compare it to. Especially since how I had to sculpt it was to build from the most inner layer of detail outward, there was no real "bulk-up" stage to show off the overall mass and pose of the figure, just progressive layers of limbs and tentacles added on growing outward to the left and right.
Hope he is received well, he a was fun and a challenge to sculpt. Thanks to Raphael for thinking of me when he had the art done and for letting me get him finished without progress pictures, it sped things up a lot as far as getting the sculpt done and a bunch of trust that I could get it like the picture to allow me to do that. And hats-off to the mold making team! I'm sure they wanted to kill me after seeing this guy and were told to make production-ready molds and they did a great job!

Massive Darkness: Bloodseeker Minotaur

A new stretchgoal with one of my mini's has been announced in the Massive Darkness Kickstarter campaign so here are the pics for it...