I'll make a man out of you

So after doing a fair few designs in my sketchbook the end product ended up being ridiculously simple, this kinda makes sense though as i had already decided his head was pretty much gunna be made up of eyes and a beard also the fewer features he has the easier it is for him to be a young and old character. This was the prototype basic head

I love this head because even though it's just eyes and a nose you know exactly what he's thinking, plus he's pretty damn handsome. Next had to make two more, one for the prisoner and one for the kid, also two identical armatures for them to go on top of.

Having only done an armature once before the main thing i was looking for was to make sure i didn't restrict it's movement too much. Last time i made one i laced it with Milliput because i was afraid it would fall apart but in doing so i covered to much of the arms and legs so they couldn't bend as far as i wanted. With these i made sure it was in the right places and that the limbs and body could be moved freely.

In the research i had done into armatures they had solid bits where ever there was a bone in the body and could only bend where humans can, it was a conscious decision not to do this as i wanted him to be able to move in very extreme ways that humans can't.

After i made the hands and chrissy knocked some awesome threads together he began to take shape....

A mistake i made was not to put anything solid in the hands so we had some trouble with them melting and falling off from time to time but other than that he's a good looking bloke, just had to make the feet, a hat and give him some luscious locks.

Here he is in his natural habitat, I made the hat with a coke bottle cap covered in the same material then cut out some card for his beard and head and stuck string on for the hair, this was originally meant to be kind of gingery brown but the grey works a lot better with the cells colour scheme.

The feet were a big challenge, we had bought some magnets to put in his feet but found out they weren't strong enough to hold him up, also we decided he would be moving around the room too much to drill holes and cover them up later. Eventually we just went with some big stompers so he was self supporting, this was only really a problem at the end when he had to run off shot.