How to Make a SEA MONSTER // Resin Art // Polymer Clay

hi folks my name is adam and i like to make tiny nerdy things and today i took a crack at bringing my nightmare to life first things first i need a body so i'll start with an aluminium base and then add clay on top and start smoothing it out until i've got a general fish like shape i've also added a thicker section up the top so that i can cut the mouth out since i want my beast to be swimming upwards mouth of gabe ready to eat our unsuspecting fisherman now my original design had a head similar to an angler fish in that the top portion of the mouth was a lot larger and he had a small flat bottom part of the mouth however once i've started smooshing the facial structure i had a flash of inspiration and realized that it looked a lot better the other way around so my anglerfish quickly became a baleen whale and then with the dorsal ventral conundrum sorted i can start adding in some detail and to really lock in my final answer on where the top of his head is i'll add some temporary eyeballs for reference then i can start working on his caudal fin and connect it smoothly into the rest of his body i also decided that his temporary eyes are going to be permanent as well so after i've poked a couple holes using the end of a ballpoint pen i can refine the shape a little bit and give him some cantankerous sea monster eyebrows oh he's uh he's also got six eyes as well because as with any of my sculptures i just kind of leap head first in and i hope it looks halfway decent by the end of it apart from a rough sketch at first i don't really have a plan so some of my design decisions end up being a little bit odd basically that's how we ended up with a baleen angler fish with snake scales on its belly and the head of a dunkleosteus oh yeah it's also got the tale of a betta fish because why wouldn't it he is of course a big spooky sea monster and while having six eyeballs makes the case big stabby teeth will seal the deal i've rolled a bunch of teeny tiny spikes and baked them ahead of time so they can be easily jammed into his fish lips one by one adding teeny tiny tcs is always a slow process but makes an absolute world of difference to the model when it's finished so it's certainly worth doing on anything you're doing at this point brad's gone in the oven for his first bake and i can start adding detail to his body i'll add some worms of clay across his body and smooth them out leaving a bumpy rolly appearance to his skin and add a little bit of texture i've got these work gloves that will work perfectly so a few pokes here and a few pokes there and brad's got some pretty gnarly looking skin maybe using a little bit of plastic wrap i can cut some final details into his skin now i know this is pretty common technique you'll see a lot of sculptors using so i figured now is a great opportunity to show why so i've got a pretty smooth surface that i want to carve some fine details in and if i just use the pointy end of my tool i'm left with cuts and gouges rather than smooth lines you can see the sharp edges all along the sides now if i lay a bit of plastic wrap down before carving the lines it's a much softer cut and you don't get the sharp edges this is pretty thick plastic wrap so the effect is really pronounced but if you use some super fine cling film you can still achieve a really sharp line without the sharp edges now what's a monster without spikes so naturally i'm going to put spikes on his back though i am going to keep them fairly minimal though mostly because i don't feel like making a bunch of big spikes i considered a proper dorsal fin but decided that the spikes are a tiny bit more monstery i think they also really helped sell brad as an ancient creature from the deepest depths of the ocean finally with his body baked one last time i'm ready to drill some holes to add his flippers i did opt for a less is more approach here and i gave him two big flippers and two smaller flippers and apart from some battle damage and cuts and scrapes i also left the texturing pretty minimal then we're on to the painting and i wanted to paint with mostly washes so i primed his body white to make my life a little bit easier then it's just a case of adding whatever colors i want all willy nilly until i'm happy i've really diluted my paints so that they're roughly 40 water 50 paint and 10 medium to make blending easier and allow that white undercoat to show through he'll end up being mostly bluish gray but his armored head will be a tiny bit darker and i given that beta tail as well as the tips of his spikes a nice terracotta coloring his mouth gets the same terra cotta and his little pointy teeth will get finished with an appropriate bone white then the absolute final detail will be using the end of a needle to poke a mosquito's fart worth of white paint onto the eyeball they're white here but i changed them to a spooky red after now with brad the sea monster done i can get started on making the truly scary portion the overall design for this sculpture came from a nightmare i had but to make it a little bit more interesting i added a sea monster i'm hard pressed to think of a worse fate than spending an entire day of my life fishing out of a tiny boat to make my tiny fisherman i'm going to build the majority of his body using armature wire only really using the clay to bulk up and shape the larger parts i'll take a short length of wire and crimp it flat to make his body and then bend the bottom section out to form his legs i can then add a tiny bit of clay onto the flat section to make his jacket and then a tiny ball of clay on top to form his head one of the things i really like about working at this scale is that it's so small that i don't even need to bother with a face just the implication of a face is enough little details like a hood on his back and one of those fun yellow fishing caps are all i really need to make it obvious what his profession is his arms will be nothing more than a couple tiny lengths of wire that i flattened both ends of and glued into place and then i'll glue him onto his tiny fishing boat and give him a tiny fishing rod i'll also get him a couple of oars made out of more shaped wire and a little red coleman cooler as well as a bailing bucket and of course a tiny tin of beer because i'm fairly certain it is against maritime law to be fishing without a can of cheap beer and once it's all been primed white it's on to adding the color and after a lot of broad messy strokes of brad's paint job it was fun change to paint something so tiny using the weirdest brushes i have it's also a lot of fun to see how a little color can breathe so much life into just a tiny bit of wire and clay i mean maybe fun isn't the right word but it is interesting at least at any rate i'm going to hang out here in this lovely little memory a tiny bit longer since painting this tiny little fisherman was the last step of the project that didn't bring me to the brink of big boy tears this is where it all starts to go very pear-shaped i knew from the outset that i wanted to embed brad in his own little resin cutout and have the fisherman idly minding his own business on the surface to achieve this i needed to build a frame that i could pour the resin into the resin i'm working with is designed to be poured up to 50 millimeters thick so naturally i decided to build the frame 90 millimeters thick because i like to live dangerously knowing that the pore was going to be a little bit thicker than it should be and produce a lot of heat and require a decent amount of time to cure i also decided that using paper thin acrylic sheet would be perfect especially if i used cheap packing tape to seal all the seams every single time i've ever made a frame for a resin pour i've double and triple checked to make sure it was water tight and not this time instead a single bead of hot glue is going to hold it all in place i can't help but feel the shot of me pouring all my resin into the smallest container and then being surprised that it doesn't fit is a perfect analogy for how the rest of this process went unfortunately the uk is completely sold out of the resin that i normally use so i had to settle for a different brand not really an issue except that i use my paints to tint the resin and while this has worked in the past it left me with little flakes here not a big issue and it's easy enough to say that's just bits of debris and ocean junk but it is something that was just adding to the list of things that didn't go well with the resin board i can set it aside and congratulate myself on being a consummate professional except that when i came back to check on the inevitable bubble situation i noticed that brad had started to breach the surface that's funny he was an inch below the surface less than an hour ago oh look at that my ram shackle frame has sprung a leak and brad is suffocating fortunately as i've said in the past the only planning i do is for my eventual mistakes so i was four thoughtful enough to put it all in a bin you know in the off chance this barely functional frame would fail after i had a good cry and reconsidered career delivering the post i took a few hours to clean everything off and rebuild the frame this time i used a full six hot glue sticks to make sure it was completely watertight and i tested it ad nauseum a lot of the resin was still usable and i only needed to mix a tiny bit more to cover the top adding another layer of resin to the top will undoubtedly come back to bite me in the ass but at this point that's pretty par for the course basically the entirety of my resin build came down to one poor decision after the other i'm willing to bet the germans have a pretty good word for this and it's probably something like uh panic lavina fortunately there wasn't any more leakage and with the resin given the requisite 48 hours to cure i'm ready to pop it out of its frame one minor issue with using a gallon of hot glue is that it makes the removal of the frame damn near impossible in one go much to my surprise though the actual resin pour itself wasn't the horror that i was convinced it would be there was a noticeable gap between the layers where i had to top it off but i had fully expected this to be the case and it's not nearly as bad as i had worried the only other real issue is that normally a low exothermic resin like this is really good at degassing on its own but having let it cure for several hours and then re-pouring it caused a whole bunch of more bubbles to appear and it was nearly impossible for them to escape on their own it's not a big deal we can just say that they're bubbles from brad ascending quickly after cleaning up the edges i'll add a layer of uv resin on top so i can plop our little fishermen down then i'll add a little bit of gloss mod podge and use a straw to create some lovely little waves then once everything is dried we are thankfully onto the glamour shots [Music] [Music] hmm [Music] so [Music] a big thank you to my newest patrons laura and brams 89 and thank you for sticking with me through this rollercoaster of emotions this one was a bit of a divergence for me but it was nice to make something original if you liked it and you want to see more of this kind of thing let me know in the comments below as always clicking on that a like button really helps out the channel and if you haven't subscribed yet well there's no better time than right now otherwise we'll see you next week [Music] cheers [Music] bye

Channel: North of the Border

Views: 1,614,223

Keywords: how to make a sea monster, polymer clay tutorial, resin art tutorial, clay monster in resin, how to sculpt with clay, how to sculpt a shark, how to sculpt a fish, fish in resin, shark in resin, thalassophobia, fishing diorama, sea monster diorama, resin diorama, north of the border, fixing mistakes with resin, how to fix bad resin pours, super sculpey tutorial, sculpting miniatures, how to sculpt a 10mm figure, diorama water, mod podge waves

Id: mOPtTpKsxGk

Length: 11min 45sec (705 seconds)

Published: Fri May 21 2021