Ultralisk, stone sculpture. DIY tutorial included.

Hey all.

After hours and hours of work (edit: many people asked, so it was about 80-100 hours), I just finished my stone sculpture of an Ultralisk today, and I posted about it in an SC2 art-related thread on the forum. I felt mightily flattered when it didn't take more than a minute for the first positive comment, and from an admin at that, recommending I write a blog about it to give it more exposure.

Well, what to write?

First of all, here are the preview images again, plus a link to the big picture and alternative views. Oh, and the mandatory link to my main web presence on deviantArt. Please leave comments there if you have an account.
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I hope some of you might have a little moment of "I want that!!!111" after seeing the pic, so I'll just include instructions how to make one. I don't want to sell it, and you probably wouldn't want to afford it at the price I'd realistically have to charge, considering the time that went into it. I usually give my stuff away as presents, but this one I'll keep.

Edit: Again, many people want to know how much this "would be". Well, consider this. It took me in the ballpark of 100 hours to make. If I did this (semi-)professionally, I should probably pay taxes. I absolutely do not work for less than 8€ after taxes, which hypothetically puts this thing somewhere around $2000+. If - again, hypthetically - I made another one I would probably be a bit faster, but nowhere near twice as fast, so it could never go below $1000.

So. On to the DIY version. Don't be afraid if you never did something like this before - you can do this. You're probably playing Starcraft, so you have a) some basic finger dexterity and b) a decent spatial intuition, because that is what many computer games are about in general. By the way: the _average_ youth today will have spent around 10000 hours of playing video games when they turn 20, which is practically the same amount of time that you have to spend in high school, total. Also, if you spend 10k hours doing something, you're bound to be very good at it (link). Apart from that, I began sculpting one day just by saying "Gee, I wonder if I can make a sculpture of my hand, chopped from wood". So I went into the basement and made one. It's certainly no masterpiece, but that was with no tutoring or preparation whatsoever, done in a couple of hours with the first best tools my father had lying around.

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Planning:
So suppose you want to make a sculpture of some SC2 unit you like, but you don't really know how and stuff. I'll further assume you want to make one from stone, because come on, it's fricking STONE and it's COOL and EPIC and it might even outlast you after your DEATH!!! Cue Brawndo commercial. Besides, soap stone is a nice entry stone that's so soft you can scrape it with your fingernail (or more practically, normal woodworking equipment or generic metal tools).

Soap stone comes in many colors and is actually quite cheap (about $2.50/kg). You can find a local outlet or internet store with google. I chose a greenish black for my ultralisk, because greenish black is awesome ( link to my preferred dealer in germany). Note that the polished stone will have a WAY different color from the raw stone. If you're there in the shop, they usually have a bucket of water with a sponge to put some on the stone, and the color it shows then is more faithful to the finished one. Once you have it at home, do a color test on a small fragment you can chop off with a hammer or something. A color test involves making a simple shape and polishing the flat surfaces to as high a gloss as you will want on your actual sculpture later on. Takes about 30 minutes, tops. Alternatively, make a smaller sculpture that is somewhat less effort to make. I made a little SC2 plaque to give to my 2v2 partner as a present.

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Now you know what you want to make, and what stone you want to use. The next step is some preparatory mousework before you pick up the tools, shouldn't take more than one or two hours in the safe comfort of your desk chair. Open up the SC2 map editor and place the unit you want to make. Leave the rest of the map empty, makes it easier to get rid of later. Shoot screenshots from as many directions as you like (I usually take no more than eight, plus a top view). Trim them in paint.net or some other graphics software you have. Arrange the pictures in inkscape (or again, something else, but I prefer freeware) and put a grid of thin lines over them, such as here. Print them out and put them in a clear protective sheath to prevent the dust and grit from making them illegible later on.
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Now you're set to start working - if you have the tools ready. For the different tools, I will refer to the different steps in my step by step documentation of the ultralisk here. Here's a preview:

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Note: Do not saw or chisel in clean indoor areas. Go outside or use a workshop or garage. If possible, wear a cheap disposable face mask to prevent some dust from getting into your lungs. FP2 is enough, FP3 is better. If you don't, don't complain about the sticky dry snot that will come out of your nose.
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Sawing
The first tool you will use (and a LOT) is a saw. Soap stones are soft enough to be sawed with regular old wood saws without dulling the blades any more than wood would. Do yourself a favor and use a sharp one. Replacement blades are cheap, and there are some that even give you an indication of the maximum hardness of stuff you can cut with them (see Moh's scale - soap stone is a one, alabaster a two to three and marbles are usually in the three to four range, also known as imho "tough as shit if you use manual tools").

The saw is important because it lets you get rid of lots of material for minimal work invested. It's way less effort to grind the width of the saw blade in stone to dust that to break it down using a chisel. Even though the latter can feel very satisfying, trust me on that one. You use it to saw the raw stone into the rough shape you want, if possible with a flat base to stand on while you work and to stand on when finished. I would invest the effort to flatten the other sides as well, because

it gives you a better idea of the size of the stone (and the maximum possible size of your sculpture - I realized I would have to slightly shorten the blades of my ultra at that stage because I hadn't gotten the proportions quite right when sawing the stone)
you can draw on the sides with crayons to track the outline and what you have to take away versus what has to stay on.

The sawing steps are noted as such in my step by step documentation.

Make sure to always draw and redraw the front, side and top view outlines of your sculpture onto the stone after you take something away. By making sure that everything within the boundary stays on the sculpture, you can't accidentally remove something you need later on. This technique is used in all stages of sculpting. If you're not sure how much you should take away, compare to your preparatory printout and redraw on the stone using a ruler to get the distances right to within a millimeter. If in doubt, take away too little rather than too much. Keep in mind that you'll lose up to 1-2 mm in the sanding stage, so don't cut to tightly.

Chiseling
I use chisels and a mallet such as these. You quickly get used to how they feel and handle when making the color test (see above) or some small geometric or other shapes from spare stone pieces. Grab the chisel in the middle, with the smaller fingers guiding the tip for precision and the strong fingers holding it steady where you hit it. Somewhat like this gentleman:
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If you want to make a hollow, don't make the mistake of hitting straight into it, because the stone becomes brittle and will break in a sort of conic shape in front of where you hit. Rather, hit the stone at an inclination:

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The first instance when you can use the technique is when you have made some cuts with the saw but physically can't get to the last surface you would need to cut away, since there's parts of the sculpture in the way. The area that can break away under your chisel is limited by the saw cuts you have already made, so you can't destroy much. I cleared the area between the legs of my ultralisk that way (you can't saw parallel to the underside of the belly, since you would have to go through the legs). Put something under your sculpture to distribute the blow, thick old cloth or (gosu) a sturdy leather or linen pillow filled with sand (cf. my workshop photo above). If you don't, basically the same force that you exert on the chisel will act on the underside of your sculpture, scratching or breaking parts there.

After you have completed the basic shape using a combination of saw and chisel, you switch over to the actual sculpting part. This is characterized by rounding off edges that will be round later on and slowly chipping away stuff to get ever closer to the final shape. Don't finish up one part completely and then do the next, this is bad for a number of reasons:

you lose track of whether the proportions are still right and all parts fit together seamlessly
you will need to turn the piece around at some point and it might then lie on fragile almost finished parts while you clobber away at the other side

I propose instead giving the whole piece repeated "passes" of increasing detail. Once all the heavy clobbering is done, you can go into finer detail without fearing you might inadvertently crush it.

I can also heartily recommend filing stuff away with implements like these. It's less error prone than chiseling and more precise, if a bit slower. You can use standard wood files.

Sanding and polishing:
Get standard wood sanding paper in grits 80 through at least 800, always roughly doubling the grit (80, 160, 320, ...). A single sheet of each should be enough in most cases. I recommend going for waterproof sanding paper and wet sanding. It's faster, cleaner and less of a dusty mess. You can actually do it in the living room if you have a suitable plate or something to catch stray spills (cf. the "sanding 120" row of the documentation). Make sure to very diligently erase all scratch marks of the previous polishing step, otherwise the final product will still have these marks. Check my ultralisk's hind legs, there's some (gray, ugly) corners I couldn't get to properly.

Once you're done with 800 (better 1600) grit polishing, you can get a suitable wax to seal the pores of the stone and thus deepen the color substantially. It's the effect you get in dry vs. wet stone, the water also temporarily seals the pores. The people in your local stone shop can tell you what to use.

And there you are. Total cost is about $200 tops if you have to buy all the tools (and those are reusable). If you have generic workshop equipment available, you'll probably just need the stone and possibly the sanding paper. Let's be generous and call it $20 for a totally unique and cool stone sculpture you made yourself.

I'm grateful for any feedback on this tutorial. If you decide to make something yourself, please share your results.

edit: some more pics added

Ultralisk, stone sculpture. DIY tutorial included.

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