You're currently looking at my take on the Protoss Immortal, sculpted only too appropriately in the material of the immortal greek masters, which according to my work-in-progress blogs (here and here) took me some 87 hours of mostly power tool work, distributed over the past year (actually, my very VERY first blog entry on this project was exactly a year and a day ago). Summarizing, it was a metric fuckload of work and I'm SO happy it's finally done*.
The original block of white sculptor's marble (statuario venato) from Carrara in Italy (probably the most famous source of sculpting marble worldwide) was about 15x15x15 cm, weighing in at about 9 kilograms (cost me only like 10 €, since it was a leftover piece, had it lying in my basement for like four years until I figured what to do with it). Haven't weighed the finalized piece yet, but should be around 2 kg, maybe a bit less. The front of the "skirt" is about as wide as a euro coin, all maximum dimensions (w/h/d) are in the 10-15 cm range, didn't remember to put a size reference next to it for the photo.
"Power-tool work" sounds like you don't have to do much physically, but as I found out (the hard way), it's quite the opposite... after all, someone has to provide the leverage for the power tools to do anything! Still, I don't want to know how long this beast would have taken with purely manual tools. Marble is such an (expletive) hard stone, I sure as hell will return to softer alabasters and soap stone variants after this (as I was once told, mandatory) excursion into the material of the old classics. Michelangelo sure had a stable full of (probably fairly chiseled, if you pardon the pun) apprentices taking care of the "simple" stuff, otherwise I don't see how any single person would be able to produce his complete works in a single lifetime.
If you think this is cool, leave a comment and visit my older project blogs: Ultralisk (some history and a DIY-tutorial included), Baneling. You might comment on my ideas for a Banshee (cloaked = semi-translucent alabaster). Visit my page on deviantArt for more stuff.
But now for the pretty pics!
*done: Sculpting, that is. Whatever scratches are still there remain there - this guy has been in battle, after all! He's been broken and, ahem, mended! There's also some administrative work left (mounting on a socket) and the question of which parts I'll polish to maximum smoothness (currently leaning towards guns, spine, possibly the racing stripes on the shoulders and some parts in the head/torso area).