I will admit it, unlike Dale and some of the really good fantasy rpg crafters out there like DM Scotty or DMG, I suck at using a hot glue gun. I find it messy, I can't control it, and the style of product it produces in my hands anyway is not as neat and "clean" as I like in a crafted figure. But, the one point that I cannot argue is that when used in large quantities more like as a sculpting medium, hot glue figures are very strong and durable. The Otyugh is sort of a "blob" of a monster, so I thought it would be the perfect figure to try to do a hot glue inspired version of. Here is the end result.
I painted him and posed him more or less like the first one I did. I also used exactly the same pieces as I did before, except I used more beads on the arms rather than the plugs. But essentially wooden construction wise, this figure is identical to the first figure with lots of wooden bits glued onto the large lady bug precut wooden shape serving as the body and head. But as you can see, after gluing all the normal beads and such to make the arms and everything with white glue, I went back over the whole figure with hot glue to make the creases in the skin and to strengthen the arms, sort of like what I did with the tentacles for the Lord of the Rings project about a month back. After the hot glue dried, this figure is quite strong and I am sure very durable. I even used the hot glue to strengthen the toothpick spines and the tile spacer "teeth" on the two arms.
Here it is from a couple of other angles.
We all have our pet peeves, so maybe "neat" is one of yours. What using all of the hot glue does do is disguise the figure as being "wooden", which is not a bad thing, unless you are going for a theme. Personally, I like it very much as as you say, it's blobbiness lends itself well to using this material. And it never hurts to make a figure stronger!
ReplyDelete