We have been making some good progress on some last minute fortune teller dice towers for the upcoming convention. Originally we hadn't planned to do a new version of these this year, thinking we just wouldn't have the time. However, after sculpting a head for the cover of a zine we are working on, I couldn't help but start to think what a new revision of the fortune teller would look like.

You can see the previous version of the goblin fortune teller dicer tower here. I like this model a lot, but one thing that always stuck out to me was the goblin figure inside. This figure was commissioned a couple years ago for this project, because while my CAD skills are pretty good when it comes to functional hard surface modelling, I have up until very recently, almost no skill in sculpting organic shapes. The figure itself I think is pretty cool but the part that didn't sit well with me was that it was entirely 3D printed.

While I have nothing against 3D printing, and certainly use it in almost every project I work on, I never like when finished projects have that 3D printed look. My favorite projects that I feel most proud of, are ones that combine a lot of different mediums to form a final result that is greater than the sum of its parts. When something is so obviously 3D printed in a piece like this, it comes off as a bit jarring and distracting, at least to me. Not to mention that painting every single one of those guys by hand was an absolute pain in the ass.

Now that I managed to claw my way through blender just enough to sculpt our own goblin head, this gave us some new options for upgrading the figure inside the cabinet. We have been learning a bit about puppet making as we ramp up our stop motion work, so I was pretty confident we could model an internal armature around which we could assemble the rest of the figure. The result was a small 3D printed block with holes for some 1.5mm steel wire that act as arms. Small 3D printed bones wrap around the wire to give it some depth and we used a bit of cotton stuffing to build out the chest and stomach area. After that we designed a pattern for some simple clothes which we cut out on the laser cutter.

Here you can see some of the freshly painted heads, which are much faster to paint when you are only working with a couple colors. The hands are getting a couple coats of white paint before we slap some tacky glue on them and shake them around in very fine felt powder to give the appearance of fluffy white gloves. Hopefully we should have the models complete by the end of the weekend, but you know what they say about best laid plans...