Fictitious marsupial creature build

Over the past few months I've been working on creating a small fictitious marsupial in silicone. I liked the idea of photographing the finished piece as a 'found' dead animal in the Australian bush. Sort of like creating a fake animal discovery. I also had the idea of creating a tunneling carnivorous creature, something like a cross between a blind mole rat and a carnivorous possum. I also wanted it to be a bit ambiguous as to if it was an adult specimen or juvenile. This blog does not feature the completed piece, but shows the work in progress.

The sculpt was done in chavant clay on several aluminium armatures. I chose chavant clay rather than plasticine as it is a bit harder and you can sort of carve it a bit unlike plasticine. I also made 12 long claws out of resin to fit the sculpture. Previously my family had reared a baby wombat who had amazing long claws, so this figured somewhat in this. Here is the creature partially assembled in clay:



After sculpting I then had to make a number of moulds for each separate piece of the creature. This creature has a total of seven different moulds. Five of the moulds I made in silicone, one in fibreglass and one in stone. Here is a shot of the creature with the mould wall and another shot with half the fibreglass mould made:





Here are the seven moulds in total that I needed to make to construct the creature:



Sculpting the creature took me a couple of weeks of sporadic work, making the moulds took me another week, and then running it with silicone and then cleaning up the seams has taken me another couple of days. I suspect assembling, painting and hair punching may take another couple of weeks of on and off work. Here is a picture of the six individual parts of the creature:



With the 12 claws in silicone it has a total of 18 pieces. With hindsight it would have been easier to make a slightly bigger creature as the pour holes for the moulds had to be pretty small and this posed a few difficulties getting the silicone to run into them. Hope you like her thus far. I will update again once I've fully assembled, painted and punched hair into the creature.