Black Pudding

I played in a convention game this past fall and the DM used a pre-painted D&D/Pathfinder miniature that I had never seen before but absolutely loved.  It was a miniature for a black pudding, which although the name is silly sounding, it is an absolutely terrifying monster.  I immediately fell in love with the miniature and went out and purchased one just to have one.  Here it is.

Very cool, right?  Then I decided to see if I could do a crafted version.  I knew that I couldn't do straight hot glue.  It is too hot and even when you apply it on top of cooled hot glue, it melts the cooled glue and you have great difficulty getting "height" to the figure (which is important in this case) unless you end up using a lot of hot glue, which I didn't want to do.  Not only that, I think if I was able to do it with just hot glue, it would end up being way too big of a figure for what I was looking for.

I decided to try to create a skeleton frame for the general shape of the black pudding with paper.  I cut several pieces to shapes that I wanted and then glued them (with PVA glue) to a wooden precut round thin wood piece as a base.  After it dried, I shaped the paper even more to make the pod like arm structures and such and to create as much movement in the miniature as I could.  Finally, I covered it all with hot glue hoping that the paper would provide enough of a foundation to support the glue so that I wouldn't have to use too much glue, and that the pods and such would still be thin enough.  It worked!  Here is the painted craft version (black base coat, soft black [dark umber brown] dry brush highlights.

Turned out pretty good I think, I'm happy with it.  Here they are side by side.