BUILDING THE SPECIMEN

The alien was designed and sculpted from scratch. Like anything, I was sketching on and off in my sketchbook to come up with the basic forms. Perusing ArtStation is an excellent way to get inspiration when you’re drawing blanks on a design and that’s exactly what I did here. I initially took influence from Cell of Dragon Ball Z but felt the resemblance was too clear in my sketches and moved on from that to create something more unique to my game.

I ended up scrapping the tail as once it was in the tank, you wouldn't see it anyways.

Here is where I decided the final look for the arms.

This page held the final sketches and ended up influencing the sculpture the most.

The head started with a basic Amazon.com plastic skull. I bought a two pack in case I screwed one up. I bought some EVA foam mats from Harbor Freight to create the superstructure around the alien's head. The creature's home planet is extremely hazardous with high winds, flying rock debris, and rolling storms. The super structure protects his head from impacts as he roams. I attached the foam strips to the skull using Barge contact cement. I had to play with the angles of the cuts to get them to sit naturally enough and reduce the amount of clay needed to blend them into the head form. With the extra bone structure added, I sculpted around the entire skull with foam clay. This stuff is super cool as when it cures (in 24 to 48 hours), it has properties very similar to EVA foam, the same foam used in the Harbor Freight mats. This was my first time using foam clay, and I love it because it keeps the project extremely lightweight (which is great as I intend to animate him some day with motors and the less weight, the better). The cure time and slight shrinkage are the only downsides I have found.

Cheesy Amazon Halloween skull.

You use water to keep the foam clay moldable. I kept a cup of water on hand at all times to keep my fingers and tools wet. This was the final sculpture.

You can see pitting around the alien's snout. This is from over wetting and thinning out the clay. Not a big deal, I just filled it in with liquid latex so I wouldn't have to wait for more foam clay to dry.

To paint the head, I mixed acrylic paint with liquid latex. I bought some molding latex to try and that worked well, but I ran out and had to use generic Halloween quality stuff. I would have preferred Monster Makers brand mask making latex, but it wouldn’t have arrived in time for me to finish before the show we had coming up. I started with a large batch of the brown base color I wanted and covered the whole head until there was no gray foam visible. After that, I mixed a darker brown for the shadows and washed that into all the deepest points. Then I finished with a lighter color and dry-brushed that carefully on to the highest points, being careful to do a little at a time.

The alien's head fully painted and finished. Very happy with the results, and it weighs virtually nothing! He will get LED eyes some day in his final form.

I wanted the body relatively poseable so I began by making a twisted wire frame/skeleton from ceiling hanging wire (Home Depot). I made the main torso from a few different pieces and joined them with gorilla tape, those pieces being the spine, the clavicles, and the hips. The arms and legs were made separate. The legs were wrapped over the hips and gorilla taped. The shoulder joints were connected via wire loops (similar to how chain links are connected) so the arms could move loosely whenever I got to animating him. I had the idea that I could use linear motion via an actuator or wiper motor pushing on his back while tethering his elbows to simulate him breathing or at least moving in a natural way, increasing the speed as the players run out of time.

The wireframe skeleton complete.

With the wireframe complete, it was time to begin the foam. Within a lot of the research I was doing on foam sculpting, I discovered Stan Winston School videos of creature professional Ted Haines working on a foam Kaiju costume. He made a lot of product recommendations in those videos, so I went ahead and just bought all the materials he used to make his foam creatures. I figured I should use what the pros use. I purchased a mix of rolls and sheets of 2” upholstery foam from Joanne’s. I laid the skeleton on the foam and used a sharpie to trace out the shape of the torso. I cut the shape out using Personna hair shaper blades, which are excellent. In the future, to cut through the entire sheet of foam I will use an extendable box cutter to keep the cuts continuous instead of having to do a few passes to get through the entire 2 inches with the Personna blades. This will help the Personna blades last longer for the actual shaping of the foam.

Personna blades are great for carving foam. They do tend to dull fairly fast in my experience but at least you get a bunch in the package.

After cutting out the torso shape, I then traced that onto another sheet of foam and cut it out again. The plan was to sandwich the wireframe between the two pieces of foam which would leave it bendable if need be. Ted Haines highly recommended 3m Foam Fast 74 spray for gluing foam together so that’s what I got, and it was awesome. After gluing it together, I then got to carving and shaping the final forms which was easy work with the Personna blades. For things like the ribs, I Sharpied on the anatomy I wanted and then would cut into the valleys with 45 degree angles (think like cutting a V shape). Then I just peeled out the channel I had cut and cleaned up the result.

I repeated this process for the remainder of the body. The creature has pointed limbs so that as he travels, he spikes his limbs into the ground like ice picks to propel forward. His shoulders and hips have elongated bones to provide extra protection from the elements (but I also really like Pumpkinhead’s design, so that's only to steal and justify that detail). Having a bendable wire skeleton made it easy to pose everything how I wanted and also adjust things for easy access in skinning and painting.

I suspended the wire skeleton from a cage light in our garage while I worked to keep an eye on the overall proportions.

For the skin of the body, I had been endlessly searching forums for the holy grail of "skinning" materials and techniques but almost every project looked great in the foam sculpting stage, but really rough once the skin was added...until I discovered Steve from SKS Props. I found Twitch streams of him building a Gears of War Theron Guard costume and he used the same Foam Fast 74 spray to adhere fleece to the foam. He would then coat all the fleece in more Foam Fast 74 to make an initial skin that wouldn't absorb the layers following it, applied 4 to 5 layers of liquid latex, and then painted with Acrylic paint mixed with latex. This looked the best I had seen out there so I did my own variation of that.

Fleece is used heavily in the puppet crafting world and I was going to use it until I realized it was hard to get quickly. Back to Joanne’s! I looked through all the bulk materials they had and texture was important to me, so I ended up using cotton batting. I’m confident that almost any fabric material would have worked so I’m excited to play with other materials in the future. One set of skills I don’t have is sewing/pattern making/etc. but I had no time to learn, so I went quick and dirty. I wrapped the cotton batting around the torso to get the general size of the piece I would need, and then added a little more and cut it with scissors. I sprayed the foam torso with Foam Fast 74 spray and then carefully laid the batting on top, pressing it into the valleys as I went, trying not to get any wrinkles. Where the batting terminates on the back of the alien became an absolute mess, but it didn't matter since players never ever see the back, so I kind of just scrunched, trimmed, and glued it to the back wherever it landed.

Despite some slight wrinkles, the first piece of cotton batting went really well. It was the limbs, however, that proved to be the most difficult.

Big oof. I hate showing this but sometimes you need to decide where it is worth putting the detail and effort. The back would never be seen by players so making it pretty would have been a waste of time. If I really cared, I could do one solid piece to cover the back and you'd never know how terrible it looks underneath. Oh well!

For the arms and legs, I couldn’t do one piece and instead did the upper arm, forearm, and spikes in separate pieces. The key here is that where they meet on the limbs, you cannot overlap or the seam is very obvious. You have to make the pieces meet up perfectly and then (in my case) use a wire brush to weave and blend the fibers of the two pieces together. This worked great. Once all the limbs were skinned, I coated the whole thing in 74 spray. I added the spray a bit thicker where the seams were to reinforce and fill in the gaps in the fibers (although those were pretty miniscule). In the end I got a few wrinkles by one of the shoulders, but overall I was happy with the results.

The finished cotton batting skin. Notice the yellow 74 spray at the joints (seams). Ignoring the discoloration, it is hard to see the actual seams.

For painting, I did the acrylic + latex mix but really only applied enough to hide the yellow 74 spray and white of the cotton batting which I would equate to two layers. I then repeated the shadows and highlights like I did with the head until I was happy with the results. It is extremely important that when you are finished working with latex on a prop that you dust the prop with talcum powder. Latex LOVES sticking to itself so the talcum powder eliminates this.

The first layer of acrylic/latex base color. I just kept sponging it on until there was no more white or yellow visible.

The final paint job. I went pretty strong on the contrast as I intended for the game to mostly be played in dim light but still wanted the forms visible in that low lighting.

The alien assembled in his final resting place, waiting for glass. I've always loved this photo due to the strong spotlight. Gives me anime vibes.

If I were to do this project again, I think I would use thin PVC pipe for the initial clavicle/spine/pelvis torso structure. It would have made it easier to mount him inside the tank in a repeatable way, but currently he has a wire loop coming out the back that hooks onto an eyelet screw and we have to jostle him around until he sits straight. Not a big deal as he is behind glass but still could have been better. A PVC pipe structure would have also given me a bit more control and flexibility to work with him. For example, I could have slapped together a pedestal with a pipe that he sits on so I could rotate him 360 degrees while I worked, whereas I just hooked him via zip ties to garage door chains and such.

I hope you enjoyed reading about this project and maybe learned some things to try in your own projects.