Heyyy I just wanna ask… how??? How did you make such a wonderful sculpture related to my dearest Slay the Princess?? I would love to hear you yap about the process, if you don’t mind!
Thank you! I’m more than happy to yap about this! 🤭
The basic answer, a lot of patience and hyperfixation, whilst listening the soundtrack on loop (the Fury/Adversary themes were really motivating!), all whilst my inner voice of the perfectionist screamed in my ear.
The long answer, a mixture of paper, masking tape, wire and air-dry clay and some polyfilla !
I started with making a rough sketch of the poses and then made like a basic skeleton-structure from scrunched up paper (to help reduce the overall weight) and taped this together with masking tape. I then wrapped thin wire around the weakest points to help give it a structure. The princess was the first one and the easiest; Quiet was a huge pain and had to be re-adjusted constantly.
Also I could not for the life of me figure out how the beak would work?? Ended up sketching some pictures as reference to try and understand which I’ve included for a giggle.
They were then stuck down onto a cardboard cake base. Literally all that is and I highly recommend for how convenient it was???
Air-dry clay was next, and I kind of just smoothed it on a bit by bit. It was easier to remove Quiet and put him to the side whilst sculpting the Princess. When she had dried, I put him back in only to find he was very top heavy. So his position was changed to be leaning on her, rather than looming over her, which made it so much more romantic than intended, but Smitten won’t complain!
Quiet’s wings are a mixture of all of the above. I made a metal ‘bone’ and stuck it to a cut-out sheet of paper and layered on shaped pieces of clay for bigger feathers. That’s probably the bit I’m most proud of for construction. When all of that dried, I went over the cracks with pollyfilla and used thicker layers to create an impression of the other feathers, which was an absolute time-saver!
The Princess’ crown and chain actually broke off during production as they were so delicate, so I made a replacement with wire and hot glue that worked nicely.
The figure was then dremeled down to make the Princess smoother, then got sprayed with ceramic primer and when dried, layers of acrylic paint were applied and blended whilst still wet for the ‘shadow’ effect on quiet.
I used as many references as I could, but found the ‘Heart’ version of the princess and a full-body shot of The Voice of the Cold during The Princess and the Dragon route to be the most useful for details! The line-art style was a fine-line pen free-handed.
So TLDR: Princess was very easy to make and loved doing, but Quiet was an absolute nightmare to produce but a very rewarding outcome. Probably a bit like what the Narrator thought.
Tbh a lot of this was trial and error and using what stuck, but that was half the fun! Now it sits on top my shelf and I love it.
