Wednesday, December 18, 2013

Thor the dark world: Malekith miniature!


I have now completed the latest wrightworks miniature foam marvel character, Malekith the dark elf, who is the villain in the new movie "Thor the Dark world".  He was supposed to be finished a while ago but I kept delaying the work. I wanted to do step by step photos showing the creation process of one of our foam miniatures so I thought Malekith would be a good example. So the first picture shows the basic start to make the body. The arms and legs are rectangular blocks of 6mm black foam and the body has an extra 3mm layer glued on. Then the head block is five 3mm pieces glued together. In the picture below I have already cut away bits of the body block to form the final shape.




Ok so a lot of cutting happens in between these pictures, which is kind of hard to document with pictures since it's slow so instead I just did before and after pictures. You can see that the chunky blocks have been slimmed down and shaped into arms and legs, as well as the basic head shape. Also the limbs were attached by poking wire into the foam, one through the arms, and one though the legs


I found some shiny silver paper that was perfect for his armor and I cut out some pieces and glued them on.



I added some more details with more paper glued on (the belts and chest star) and then began to cut out a cloak from some lightweight fabric. It was tricky to cut out a good shape that could be wrapped over his shoulders and glued together but I eventually did something that worked.



Next I started the hair by cutting off the top and back of his head and gluing some chunks of white foam on in in those places.




Here is what it looked like after I cut it into the shape of his head. I also added very thin foam pieces to the sides of the head, leaving spaces for the ears, which were more tiny foam pieces (also they must be cut pointy since he is an elf)





I sort of skipped a lot now and only have a picture of his face after all the details were made. The eyes were tiny pieces of paper with pen ink dots for pupils and his mouth is a simple line drawn with a pen. Also Malekith wears a weird armor piece on his head that I cut out of paper. He is wearing the fabric cloak here as well.







The only thing left to do was put some paint on the right side of his face since in the movie it is supposed to be burned from Thor's lightning (I guess thats a spoiler if you haven't seen the movie). The 2-face look is his signature appearance in the comic books as well, though it was half blue and half black rather than black and pale like this.







I may actually add some more paint to make the burned face darker, but it is quite hard to work with paint at this scale.

So that's Malekith! I hope you like him, I pretty happy with the way he turned out and there weren't really any problems with making him.