Irrational Number Line Games, LLC
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In a Kingdom of Blind Men ...
Well, I think these guys would be king pretty much anywhere you go, but a fistful of cyclopses can go a long
way. These are pretty easy conversions, being based on the concept of recapitations
that we frequently use. Since we end up with custom sculpted heads (Don't worry ... I can't sculpt, either.
There are two "cheats" to make it easy.), I didn't even bother with mucking about to reposition some of the arms
for variety.
So, for giant cyclopses, we need giant figures. The base we are using the the HeroClix Awesome Android figure. You
can usually find it in the bottom of the "dollar-clix" bin at your FLGS. En masse. Since we are using a "big" fig
like this, the complexity for sculpting a tabletop quality figure is much lower than a "regular" 28mm figure. Along
with the decapitated body base we have a couple of other parts. The heads will be made with
Crayola Model Magic
clay. This stuff is not the best sculpting clay in the universe. It's not great for high detail. It stays soft (but
keeps form) when air dried (which it takes a while to do). But it's cheap and good enough for big, lumpy volumes of
stuff. Perfect for misshapen cyclops heads.
In the front of the pic, you can see how we get away with using the clay. While the heads are OK with big, sweeping
forms, to get a good model you really need detail for the eyes and teeth. So, my two "cheats" for using MM clay. For
the eyes, we will use beads. Your FLCS (C=craft) should sell big pound bags of various cheap plastic beads for cheap.
These will make a good solid eye. For the teeth (always a pain), I just collected a bunch of the plastic nibs I cut
off other pieces, right off the little thing I collect them in to throw them away. The tiny bits of plastic will allow
you to make teeth that look good without detailed scukpting. We can get away with this because no one expects (or wants)
cyclopses with nicely ordered, well groomed teeth.
[1] Put a roundish glob on the head. I also apply some adhesive to the neck to hold
the thing in place after the clay dries.
[2] Stick in a bead for the eye. Be sure to leave the string hole pointing forward. Instant iris!
[3] Smoosh it in around the eye.
[4] Smoosh up a nose. Also, pick his nose with a toothpick and you get nice nostrils.
[5] Cut open a big, wide mouth, and stick in some teeth.
[6] Now smoosh the mouth to a semi-closed position
[7] Finally, scrunch down the head. Notice how he goes from "cartoony" to "grumpy" with this small effort.
I glued (regular PVA glue) a piece of paper towel over his Speedos into a more loinclothy piece. Once you prime the
figures with spraypaint, the loincloth will be rigid enough to paint. Just a basic painjob for these guys and
not a lot of futzy detail. The whole point is to draw attention to the one eye, so I didn't want a lot of stuff
to distract from that. All in all, I think this ended up being a nice project for the cyclopses ... and their
little dog, too!