Making An Eight-Limbed Villain With My Own Two Hands

Recording stuff in our studio for our YouTube channel means someone’s always hovering over your shoulder with a camera, capturing everything you work on, warts and all.  But sometimes it works out. Like when it caught most of my Doctor Octopus sculpting process and gave me some relatively-wart-free content to post this step-by-step this week!

Here’s a quick breakdown of how I put this figure together. I knew the mechanical ‘octopus arms’ would have to be separate. So I set myself up with some little metal channels to shove the arms into after the figure was done.

I don’t know what they’re called. I just scoured the local hardware store until I found something I thought would work. Then I sculpted them right into the core of the figure.

Then it was just a matter of building up the figure with Super Sculpey Firm around the core.

…making sure, of course, to leave those channels open for the arms later.

My Doc Ock is going to be a little cartoony, so I want to make him pudgy but with a solid foundation of muscles underneath the cookie dough ice cream.

The main body of this figure is only about 4 or 5 inches tall, so there are a lot of tiny little parts I had to sculpt, like his baby shoes and itty bitty hands.

His head leans hardest into cartoon territory: bowl cut, bug eyes, giant potato nose, impossibly wide grimace.

That’s just how I saw him in my head and it works for me (and the final diorama).

With most of the body done, I should point out again that I used Super Sculpey Firm. I had to handle a lot of tiny parts on this sculpt that I think would’ve smooshed out of shape had I used anything else.

Once everything’s attached, it’s into the oven for baking.

You can tell in this closeup that, besides having to make his goggles out of CosClay, another detail that had to be taken care of before painting was sanding.

He’s got a lot of rough edges and texture baked in, and if I want the paint job to look smooth, I need to hit that with some medium to fine sandpaper.

Now let’s make the robot parts. I knew I wanted them bendable and durable, so CosClay was my choice for the mechanical arms.

I flattened the CosClay in a pasta maker, then rolled it tightly around some heavy, 9-gage armature wire. I don’t have a shot of me doing this, but before I baked the arms, I sliced segments along the length of them with a craft knife.

Once they’re baked, they fit perfectly into those little metal channels I left for them.

Painting was just acrylic craft paints, brushed on. I did a dark green wash to try to catch the nooks and crannies in the design.

The arms were done with a mildly metallic grey paint to give them a mechanical feel.  And the CosClay worked like a charm, giving me the ability to bend them into the shapes I needed.

Doctor Octopus is only my 8th figure sculpt (couldn’t have planned that if I tried) but I think I made some progress with him.

Working small is a little difficult for me, but I forced myself to do it and learned a little from it. I also focused on post-bake sanding more than I have with past sculptures and I think it paid off. Definitely something to investigate further.

And there he is, proving that the mechanical arm experiment worked. If you want to see the rest of the diorama and the spider-sculpts that Michelle and our friends added to it, the video link is at the end of this post.