Fiddling with Bertram – Gavin part 1

Blimey. Five months since the last post… I’ve not died, I’ve just not finished any projects off in that time. This is a bit rubbish but I have been busy, honest. In fact I’ve finished the Goddess recently and also reached a halfway stage on the project I’ve asked you all here to talk about. A few months ago I was approached by Bertram Fiddle, leading Victorian Explorator, to immortalise his noble manservant Gavin as part of a Kickstarter project to fund his next adventure game (I’m not sure about how a Victorian explorator was able to get in touch with me over the vast gulf of time that separates us but I’m sure it involved brass tubes, cogs and some steam).

Armed with a number of images of Gavin, I was able to quickly sculpt a passing semblance of the chap in a short space of time. And by short, I mean a few weekends where I binge watched all of Gotham and several series of Stargate SG-1 (thank you netflix) and he is one of the quickest sculptures I’ve done recently.

Gavin started off as a bit of wire slathered in Milliput to work out the rough hight, then I broke that apart after realising he had two legs not one (proper facepalm moment when I notice his legs have a gap between them). Lots of wire, milliput, brass tube, Super sculpey firm, wood, pins, primer paint and more super sculpey firm later, voila. A body. The hands and gun got built independently as I wanted to cast them separately from the main body. When cast he will be assembled, painted by hand and then mounted on a wooden base befitting such a noble servant.

There are more pictures of the build process on Google https://goo.gl/photos/TL21w7ZD3vu1fpT49

This is now in a holding pattern above Kickstarter, I told Bertram that I’d only start moulding under two conditions, firstly that there was at least one crazy person who backed the pledge level to get a Gavin, and that the Kickstarter itself was funded. Within about an hour of it launching, SOMEONE PLEDGED A GAVIN! (no, it wasn’t me trying to but them all up).

Its only been a few hours after launching but its already reached over £2,000 and I’m now thinking I have to order a lot of Oomoo…

Go check the Kickstarter project (have i posted that link enough yet) and I’ll write up my notes on the Goddess in the next few days, but I’ll just mention that as well as these two projects I’ve also been working on my Judge Dredd helmet and also another dragon sculpture. I’ll pop up some pics of those but if you want to keep up with anything I’m up to at the moment, its worth finding me on the Castings of Cthulhu Facebook as I’ve been posting more updates on there, including some finished painted Cthulhu Wars figures and some work in progress shots of various things scattered around the dungeon as I’m working on them.

Right, I’m off to hit refresh loads of times on the Kickstarter project page and start to sweat about how much work this is going to be when I come to mould, cast and paint a possible 20 figures…