I made a massive Space Marine from a block of clay

Hi folks, my name is Adam and I like to make tiny nerdy things, but sometimes I kinda wish these tiny nerdy things were slightly larger. I could of course just get something already made shipped straight to my door, but why would I spend almost 20 Great British dollary dues to buy it when I can spend well over ten times that amount in materials and around two weeks of my life to make a slightly inferior version of my own? Now I happen to think the best copycat creations are less functional and more fragile, so I'll of course be making my massive space marine out of clay, which means I need to give him an all-aluminium armature skeleton. So once I've marked out where his bones and joints will be, I'll snip off some lengths of wire that I can bend into shape to be his torso and legs. However, this beefy space boy is going to be pretty top heavy, so he's going to need some impressively thick bones to match his impressively thick frame. This wire takes a bit more work to bend into shape, but it should be a lot less likely to bend under the weight of all that clay, which means after 40 hours of sculpting there will, hopefully, be a slightly reduced chance of my chonky space boy breaking his bones. Otherwise, now that his hardy aluminium underbody is built, I'll bulk out the chest with a bit of aluminium foil before mounting him on a wooden block. Unlike the cheap and cheerful plastic space marine, my Astartes is going to be stuck in a single pose, which means I need to figure out an adequately heroic position. I eventually settled on a Captain Morgan pose, since it's hella heroic, and then I vacillated between which arm is up and which is down, before eventually deciding he'll be holding a bolter in his right and a chainsword in his left. I then summoned my reference photo from the warp and made sure my proportions were at least accurate so far, before getting on to building up the initial layering. Every space marine wears a form-fitting black bodysuit under his armor made of copious noodles wrapped lovingly around his torso. However, the majority of this will be hidden by the future armor plates. To that end, once I've built up Bob's underlying noodley bodysuit, I'll smooth it all flat and cut and carve the noodles into his knees, hips, and torso, leaving everything else smooth since those will be the only parts that are visible. A combination of flat knives and soft clay shapers will create the necessary noodley bits and a once over with a heavy healthy dosing of isopropyl alcohol will make sure everything is nice and smooth and it's into the oven to bake so I don't smoosh my wormy under armor as I build up the rest of the body. Now, normally in the far future of the 41st millennium, everyone seems to be standing on tactical rocks, but I have something better planned. However, for the time being, I need something for Bob to rest his left foot on, so I'll attach a little block to the big block and begin building out his boots. With the base layer of the boots done, I can add his upper leg plates, which I'll make by rolling a thicker sheet of clay through my pasta machine and cutting it to size on his thighs. At this scale, there's a lot of opportunity to increase the amount of detail visible since the model is significantly larger, but I wanted to stick to the original design, so I'm going to keep the greeblies and whatnot to a minimum. This is, of course, based entirely on artistic integrity and respecting the work of the original sculptors, and not because I'm lazy and didn't want to add all sorts of extra work for myself. Otherwise, once the armor's been baked again, I'll crack out my sanding sticks and make sure I've got a nice smooth surface. This is very much a recurring theme here, even if I don't show it, but basically every time I've added another layer of armor plates, I've baked it and sanded it nice and flat. Now with my boots in place and my surface as smooth as I can be bothered to make it, I can begin to build out the next layer of armor plating. I really wasn't sure when I started the sculpture how much work would be involved, but apart from it taking an extra week to put together, the actual process was pretty easy since a Space Marine's armor is just plates on plates on plates. If you're careful and at least think a little bit ahead, you can safely bake each section between parts without fear of messing something up later. What makes it even easier is each section of the body is separated by a black noodley underarmoured gap which means you never really have to worry about blending sections together. Now as far as my sculpture is concerned once I'd added the oversized ankle gonads I can give Bob a much needed armoured banana hammock before getting to work building up his great big space marine boots. This was probably the trickiest part to make but I ended up using my clay as a transfer so I could make a plastic stencil that I can then use to make two identical plates for the boots. With the knee high boots in place, I can refine the shape while on the model then mark out the space for future knee nuts before baking it and sanding it like always. Once it's nice and smooth, I can add those aforementioned knee balls and make sure they're nice and round. With that, the lower half of the body is all but finished so I can get to work fine tuning his torso. I'll start by adding some initial belly and back plates before adding a substantial amount of clay on top to build up his chest and shoulders and upper back. I want to build his torso in its entirety before I add the arms so I'm going to take a page out of the miniatures and leave the sides of the torso slightly indented which should make it easy to add some noodley under armor later. Using my biggest little cookie cutter I'll cut a big hole in the top of his torso and hollow it out before adding another thin layer of clay on top to add that final layer of upper body armor. His back is a bit thicker to allow for his space marine backpack, so I'll thicken that up with a thick sheet of clay cut to size and blend it in before returning to his top torso hole and adding an oversized gorget, which I believe in America is called a zucchini. Some final strips of clay poked with the flat of a scalpel blade will be the random back greeblies, and I can add his teeny tiny backpack that will eventually hold his great big portable generator. Otherwise, I can give him a nice thick belt loop to round his waist. And a fancy little space marine buckle. Finally, with the belt in place, I can add his butt flaps and skirt plates. Those then are the final pieces for his torso, which means the only thing left to do, apart from everything else, is add his arms. These, much like the legs, are mostly black noodles cupped in armor plates, so I'll start by covering the wire in clay and cutting lots of little noodles into the joints. Then, once it's been baked, I can add some more armor plates and cut them into the correct shape as well. I'll make some little shoulder plates to be covered in oversized plates later, then I can cover his elbows with some nice thick elbow pads. Speaking of thick, his boots are a bit thin so I'll pop them off the block and add some thick sheets of clay to the undersides of his boots and once they've been cut to size and baked, I can cut and sand them until Bob's boots have some nice high quality Heretic stomping treads. Finally for a final bit of bodywork, I thought his torso was a bit naked, so I decided to add the Emperor's Aquila to that great big blank space on his chest. Also, it's important to remember that in the 41st millennium, even the good guys are bad guys, so instead of the Emperor's double-headed eagle, I'm gonna put a skull in the middle, which according to Google, makes it an imperialis. Are we the baddies? Regardless, with that little bit of nomenclature out of the way, that's Bob's body built to the best of my abilities, so it's time to make a head. Of course, given that this is a space marine, why would I make a head when I can make a helmet? I'll start with a little ball of aluminum covered in clay and baked to give me a nice firm surface to work on. I'll then drape this in a thin sheet of clay and squish it flat before cutting away the section for the face plate. I'll add a tiny bit of clay on top so I can build up the mouth and nose grill then add some eyes before spending a frustrating amount of time smoothing the surface out so I can chop the chin off and poke some slanted breathing slits into the front. I'll add some blocky bits onto the sides then shape them into little metal ears before adding the space marine mohawk on top and the back of the head banding around the bottom. Some final greeblies around the sides of the faceplate will give me a place to fit a couple of pipes and I can bake the head and stick it onto an extra long neck noodle that I'll then cut more of those little black Under Armour noodles onto. Once this is baked I can cut the neck free and squish it onto the upper torso hole which I have filled with some fresh clay leaving the neck behind and the head free to be removed for painting. I'll add a bit of detail inside the gorget but that's the helmet otherwise finished so it's time to make some hilariously oversized shoulder pads. These need to be relatively thin and uniformly curved so I'm going to smoosh up some aluminium foil and round the surface so I have a form that I can build my space marine pauldrons on top of. I baked the shoulder pads once to cure the top clay, then filled the interior with some Super Sculpey so it's got less flex, then I can whip out my sandpaper and make sweet, sweet music. A long wormy dealy wrapped around the edge and smoothed over the side will give me a clean surface that I can cut the little slits into. Then it's back to the sandpaper to make all the surfaces nice and flat and smooth before cutting some long, thin strips of clay to wrap around the edge of the shoulder pad to make the trim. I'll then repeat these steps again to make the other pad, and it's time to make his backpack. I'll start with an extra thick slab of grey clay that my camera has decided is impossible to focus on, then I'll chop all four sides square then taper the bottom half downwards and cut the sides into a flat bottomed arrow before baking it again and covering it in a very thin sheet that I'll cut ever so slightly undersized. Then it's just a case of cutting some vents into the bottom section before building up the roundy looking bits by layering up a circle and some other circley bits that then get And then get covered in another thicker circle that then gets rounded smooth. This then gets little circles cut out of it before even little circles will fill the empty space. A couple more circles will get stuck to the side and I can fit a big old cylinder on top and blend it in so it's slightly overhanging. This will then give me some space to stick a couple little lengths of wire into, which I'll use to stick some little circles onto followed by flattened balls. All this gets blended together and I'll drape another sheet with a circle cut out of it over top and blend that in to create a bit more of the shape I want before adding some circles to my balls and carving some grills into them. Finally I'll wrap the grilles in some more circles and add a bunch of greeblies along the blank spaces and stick some pre-baked side vents onto the bottom of the backpack. Otherwise we're done here so it's time to make some weapons and hands I'll start with the left hand which will be holding a chainsword and to make the blade of my chainsword I've cut a thin strip of clay into which I can cut some equally sized spaces. I'll then work my way back and forth with clay shapers to smooth the points into teeth then bake it so I can peel it off and sand the sides flat with a rounded file until the teeth are pointed towards the middle. I'll then sandwich the blade between a sheet of clay and cut away the excess leaving the teeth exposed, though this is more of a hot dog than a sandwich so I guess let me know in the comments below if you think a hot dog is a sandwich. Otherwise, I'll drill a hole into the bottom of the hot dog sword so I can fit a length of wire that I'll wrap in clay to make my handle, which I'll then cover in semi-random greeblies. To make the hand itself, I'll mash a mitten of clay onto the clay handle and wrap it around until I've got a good grip before carving the fingers into it and adding the thumb. I'll then wrap the wrist and palm in plenty of Under Armour noodles before building a guard out of stir sticks wrapped in clay. Finally, a little grey donut can get smooshed onto the flat of the wrist. By wrapping Bob's arm nub in a little bit of cling film, I can then press this clay donut onto the exposed arm bone and fit the hand in place without worrying about the clay adhering. This way I can remove it and paint it at my leisure. To make Bob's bolter I've printed out a little bolter template that I'll use to cut a relatively thick slab of clay into the appropriate shape before baking it and sanding it smooth. I'll then drill a little hole to fit a wire handle that will get wrapped in clay to become the grip. I'll then press the bolter onto a thin sheet of clay and cut it so it's flush with the top and front of the gun before carving away bits and pieces until I've got an appropriately A really cool looking bolter profile. I've wrapped a bit of dowel in some clay to make the barrel, and I've made a curved magazine that can get added onto the bottom before adding a couple more odds and ends to finish off the body. The hand can get attached in much the same way as I did with the sword, except the index finger will be extended onto the trigger, which I'll forget to add, so you'll have to use your imagination. At least I remembered the trigger guard. Now all good bolters need a little embellishment so I've made another flying skull but this time it's facing forward so Bob knows which way the bullets go when he pulls the trigger. However at this point I was well and done making wings so I opted to add a little banner to the other side. Otherwise that's the final finishing touches finished for the firearm and I can stick it on to Bob's other arm. I want to be able to remove the hands to paint the weapons but I don't want there to be a gap so I'm going to build up the forearm a tiny bit and make the connections as smooth as possible between the wrist donut and the arm nub then I can cover it all in greeblies to hide any imperfections. Finally to affix the backpack I'm going to pay fan service to you miniature builders and add magnets so I can add and remove the backpack whenever I want. With that Bob is completely finished and I can fully assemble this beautiful space boy. Of course, while he's looking pretty darn good, he might be looking a little too good, so I'm gonna start chopping away. In the 41st millennium, there is only war. So why do all these Space Marines look so damn pristine? I like my guys to look like they've been to hell and, well, not quite back yet. To that end, I'm gonna strategically poke and prod and chop and hack until Bob's body is incredibly well worn. Finally, Bob is finished, but before I can get to the painting, I need to make him a pedestal. And what better pedestal for a space fascist to stand on than the corpse of a xenos. Orcs of course play a prominent role in the 41st millennium and for my part they're the perfect pedestal because proportions and anatomical correctness are secondary to being big green and angry. I'll start with a lump of aluminium wrapped in a sheet of clay then I'll attach a couple oversized arms splayed out in an oops I'm dead pose before building up the muscles around his chest and giving him a big fat muscly beer belly and big bulging biceps. The head I'll make by wrapping a little aluminium ball in its own clay covering, then poking some eye sockets and framing a little flat nose. Once I've got that not quite right looking skull I can attach the oversized bottom jaw and begin to bulk out the cheeks and the cheekbones. I'll then pop some little black eyeballs into my pre-poked eye socket so I can begin building up the eyelids and cheekbones before finally poking some sniffing holes into the front of his little pig nose and refining the overall shape. I've pre-baked some teeth that I can squish onto that oversized, impressively dimpled jaw before using my ball stylus to add some surface detail. Finally, I can fit a neck onto the back of the head to make attaching it easier, and I'll give this decapitated head a couple appropriately orky-looking ears, and he's ready to get pressed onto place on the body. I don't know much about future orc anatomy, but I think they suffer from nerd neck resulting in a head that's always tilted somewhat forward, even when they're sleeping or... Dead. Once I've thickened up the muscles around the neck and shoulders, I'll give the muscles some extra detailing, then move on to making some great big hands. To make space orc hands, I'll start with a big blob of clay and smoosh it into a fingerless mitten into which I'll cut some fingers, then it's just a case of poking, prodding, twisting, and pulling until I've got an appropriately impressive sausage fingered open fist that I can attach to my outstretched arm. I'll blend the connection point then repeat this process to make the other hand then give everything a good smoothing out with a thick coating of isopropyl alcohol. Finally all that muscle needs some gnarly definition so I'll make some extremely exaggerated veins by trailing goopy trails of bacon bond using a toothpick. Last but not least I made a little leather strap which will hold his little metal shoulder plate in place. Otherwise I've now got something for my Space Marine to stand on but I need something for my orc to lie on. I want Bob to be standing with one foot planted on the orc's belly, but I didn't think about how far the orc's arms would reach when I put them splayed out above his head so I'm going to need to make a substantial base. Fortunately I've got some thick chunks of XPS foam left over from past projects that I can glue together nicely and then chop up until it resembles a chunk of rocky earth. Of course, if this is rocky earth then it needs to look rocky, which means it's time Time for rocks. With my rock looking like a rock, I wanted to do something to hide the joins in the top of the foam, but rather than cover them up, I figured I could just cut a few more lines into the surface and add lots of cracks to make them look like concrete slabs. I want to make a bunch of concrete walls with various bits of rebar sticking out, so I'll take these blocks of thick XPS foam and snap them down to size. I'll then stab the smooshed up ends of the XPS with lots of little lengths of armature wire that I can then cut into random lengths and stick more little bits of foam onto. These will be my rebar embedded concrete rubble bits and I'll take some of the larger chunks and smash them up good to make a couple larger chunks to fill in the gaps on the base. I need these larger chunks since my original idea was to have my orc halved with his inside parts sort of falling out. However, my non-platonic roommate asked me ever so nicely to not do that since she hates gore, so instead of noodley intestines, I'm going to cover his missing bottom half in big blocks of foamy concrete. Before I add too much though, I want to make sure the framing is fine for Bob since he's going to be the star of the show, but once he's temporarily in place, I can fill in the rest of the space, cover the remainder of my not disemboweled orc, and sprinkle lots of little chunks of foam everywhere else to make it look like a completely destroyed building. I'll then give the base a thick spritzing of isopropyl alcohol followed by a thinned out PVA glue to lock the foam in place. And to add a bit more texture I'll sprinkle lots of little rocks and bits of gravel over the entire base. I can then set this aside to cure and get back to painting Bob. Now there's a lot of colourful options when it comes to painting a Space Marine but I've always been partial to the more muted look of the Dark Angel's blade guards so I'll start by giving Bob a pale bone white primer. Now with the primer in place I can set about adding the initial details starting with his chapter insignia on the shoulder, however I thought it might be fun to put my channel logo on his shoulder instead. And spoilers, it was not. I started by sketching out the design with a pencil before realizing I have neither the skill nor the patience to freehand an intricate Celtic knot. Next I thought maybe I could make a stencil but it would need to be big enough and flexible enough to wrap around the curved pauldron which led me to try and make one out of clay. Once I'd cut the initial leaf shape out I realized I needed to add all those little empty sections into the correct places and my balls began to itch. So instead I scrapped that idea and decided that maybe it would be a little stylized shoulder plate with a raised design instead. To that end I took the previously removed logo and cut that out of the clay instead. I still had to remove all the little bits but it's a lot easier to cut these out from the larger design and finesse the fit after. Now once I've got a kind of shaky looking leaf attached to my pauldron I can go about cleaning up the cuts while it's attached as well as adding the loops and swirls that make this leaf a knot. This actually ended up being a lot easier to do with the clay since my painting skills leave a lot to be desired and having it in three dimensions on the clay helps me out. I added the circles around the outside and chopped it up a bit to add a little bit more battle damage but other than that we're finally ready to paint. Now I don't paint Space Marines but I watch a lot of videos of people that do and this particular paint scheme is heavily inspired by fellow YouTuber Trovarian who made a ridiculously cool looking Space Marine at a significantly reduced scale I've linked their video below, so absolutely go and check that out. For my part though, I started by base coating the body in a weathered bone wash before coming back through with a much lighter bone white to highlight all the larger surfaces and raised sections. By staying away from the edges and recesses, this should give me a nice base that I can then come back to with that first weathered bone wash and repaint the entire body to blend Blend all the tones together. I'll then edge highlight all the edges with a light highlight to add edge highlighting to the edges before getting out my favorite painting tool to add texture and to make the surfaces a little less smooth. I don't much care for painting but if I have to do it then I'll almost always choose to use a sponge. I'll start with the darker tones and work my way up through the lighter highlights to give everything a sort of messy textured appearance. Before I add the weathering I want to paint the logo on the shoulder so I'll start by painting the blue parts blue and the red parts red. I can edge highlight with black then add some black into each of the creases of the knots before adding some brighter reds and blues to finish it off. Now the only thing better than painting with a sponge is adding weathering and battle damage with a sponge. I'll haphazardly sponge a dark graphite along the edges and around the big missing bits of armor. I don't really think you can overdo this part but if you accidentally go a bit overboard with the damage you can always sponge the lighter armor tones on top and no one No one will ever notice. For the spots my sponge can't reach I'll use a brush. With the brush I can also flick little bits of graphite outwards as well as create longer chips and cuts as well as join some of the larger chips. Finally once I've added all the blackish bits I can apply a bit of natural steel into the deeper grooves where Then it's on to painting the noodley black under armor, which I'll start by painting with a flat black followed the damage has gone deep enough. by some dark grays to light gray highlights. To add a bit of color variation, I'll paint the belt with a leather brown and the buckle and imperialis with a silver. I'll then coat both of these silver bits with a verdigris and rub away the top to leave me with a sort of greenish silver finish. Finally, although it flies in the face of reason, I added a tiny bit of rust around both of these since I thought it looked cool. I know silver doesn't rust but I like how it looks and this is a nine foot tall spaceman with two hearts so I think we can give a bit of room for a rusty silver belt buckle. I'll then paint the silver bits on his helmet silver as well as do the same for the vents on his backpack. I'll give the chainsaw teeth a couple coats of gunmetal followed by a silver highlighting then I can paint the handle with a steel and a bit of sponging will give the blade a sooty metallic finish. Finally I'll add some silver chipping with the sponge and I add lots of little nicks and scrapes in silver using my teeniest tiniest brush. I'll paint all the metallic bits of the bolter with a silver and steel mix since that's what I had left over in my mixing pot, then I'll give the entire body of the gun a dark red base coat followed by progressively lighter red sponges over top. The entire gun will get lots of weathering with a silver coated sponge and brushed on chipping. I can then paint the flying skull gold and paint the banner beige. I wanted something suitably cool for the banner but couldn't think of anything that wasn't cringe-inducingly edgy so I just went with north for a little self-promotion. Finally I'll give every single piece of bob that was painted in metallics a brownish blackish wash to give it that final ever so important tarnishing. All that's left to do then is paint the eyes red which I'll do by adding progressively brighter reds towards the center of the eye ending with a final fluorescent red to make them as glowy as I can. With that, Bob is finally finished and ready for final assembly, and dare I say he's looking like an absolute baller. Uh, except he's perhaps a little too top heavy. I'd considered giving him a tartan tabard, but decided that would look a little bit too busy, so instead I made him a couple little tactical pouches for his belt and a sweet heretic stabbingly big combat knife. Otherwise, Bob is finished, so I just need to finish the base. At this point, the glue is cured, and all it needs is a bit of color. I'll start by priming the base black, followed by a little bit of zenithal highlighting, which is really just blasting white from the top down. I'll give the nameless legless orc a base coating of sick dog green then completely coat the rocky bits with several coats of grey. The zenithal priming will have only added white to the topmost layer of the base leaving all the cracks and hidden parts black so by layering up the greys in thin translucent coats I should be able to retain the shading. To add a bit of depth to the brighter spots though, I'll follow the gray top coats with a full soaking in an umber and black wash. Once that's had a chance to dry, I'll dry brush all the stonework with progressively lighter shades of gray, followed by some brownish grayish stippled into the darker sections. The orc is a bit too dark for my taste, so I'll sponge a couple coats of lighter but still very orc-appropriate greens on top to create a much more vibrant skin tone, before painting his eyes black with teeny tiny red pupils. Finally, I can paint his mouth with some reds and terracottas, before painting his teeth with bone whites, whites, and a sepia wash. All the exposed rebar will get base coated with some metallic steel, followed by a couple coats of rust colored rust paints. I painted the leather strap leather with little silver bolts and I gave a shoulder pad a metallic finish with some red sponged over top since red is the fastest color. Finally I can fit Bob in place triumphant over his enemy and that's us finally finished and on to the glamour shots. As always, a huge thank you to the Absolute Gems over on Patreon and a special hey how are you to my newest patrons. Michael Patton, Robin Hamel, Austin Welter, BeckxKat, Whitney Loinol, Sincera33, Beer in the Shell, Zachary Arthur, HappyBirthdayTatiana aka Bebooski, Charlie Yeaman, Tara Dewin, Billy Robinson, Lou Bell Mason, Koi Boy, HappyBirthdayScout, TheSauceKids, Lilo, Jake Holding, Godfinsty, Bexis, Silver, Kristen, and Ashley Priest. You are the strategically placed rocky bits of rubble that keep this channel's insides from falling out. I hope you liked this one, because, man, it was a long one. If you made it this far, then thanks, I guess. Otherwise, we'll see you next time. Cheers.