It Can't Rain All the Time: Nintendo Charity Gallery Submission

"Tappy"
Edric Yamamoto, 2014
Magicsculp, acrylic paint

This year I was lucky enough to get selected to submit a piece for the SHM Charity committee's Nintendo gallery. Proceeds from the gallery auction will go to the Morgan Autism Center, an organization devoted to helping autistic individuals. You can find more information about Morgan Autism Center here: http://www.morgancenter.org/

Each artist was assigned either a character from a game or a game where we were free to choose any character from. I was given the latter, in the form of a rhythm game called HarmoKnight from the makers of Pokemon.

Having never heard of the game, I did a fair bit of research and the main protagonist of the story just seemed a little vanilla. However, the bunny sidekick was ridiculously cute and the villain was pretty badassedly cute as well. And sidekicks never get the glory, so I decided to focus my efforts there.

I started off with some sketches....

and with some help from my good friend Samia, found an idea/pose that I liked.

I normally don't build a fully fleshed out armature in my previous sculpts, opting to add wire for support here and there but this time around I wanted to try working with a more organized structure.

Aluminum foil was a nice way of adding body w/o using the much heavier and expensive clay. I threw a quick clay covering to get everything solid and allowed that to cure fully before moving on.

Various stages of sculpt.

After the sculpt was done, I sanded out the imperfections, primed with a flat white spray primer and started adding my base coats.

He ended up being a little top heavy with the bulk of his mass being in the head/helmet area so I didn't trust just epoxy to hold it to the base. I drilled a hole and attached a wooden peg to add strength and epoxied the whole thing together.