“Forgotten Heroes, The Cat in the Hat”

Week two of “Forgotten Heroes”, and it was really just more of the same with the week spent working on Battle Cat’s face/helmet, I started by adding the lower jaw area beneath the tongue I’d added last time, this was done in much the same way as I had with Panthor (see last week’s post, “Now I’m Feline It”), the only real difference was that I added some longer “whiskers” to his chin, as he seems to have these in the cartoon, something that Panthor doesn’t appear to have and as I painted them onto my “Cringer” I thought I better had.

Next it was time to start work on the helmet, now before I start I’d just like to point out that these types of things are not my favorite to do, as they a) have to be really smooth, and b) need to match perfectly one side to the other, you can get away with organic things not being symmetrical, because live thing ain’t! But inorganic stuff like armour usually is. So it was with a little trepidation that I set to work. I started by adding the “beak” like ridge down the top of his nose, this was a small “carrot” shaped piece of putty run out over the end of his nose and then curved down, I had trouble getting it to stick far enough out so ended up adding a ball of putty on his muzzle (like a red nose), to support this. Then more sausages were added either side of this and dragged down the sides of the muzzle, and then yet another pair of sausages were added to the lower sides of these along the top of the lip area, all this was then shaped and blended together (this took as while I can assure you!). I then rolled out a very thin sausage of putty and draped this across in front of where the eyes will go, this was then smoothed into place and blended into the lower ridges. Lastly today I took the small knife blade and pressed in three ridges that run down the top of this part. It’s not a perfect copy of the original, but it’s as close as I recon I’m going to get it.

So I had the muzzle piece done, now it was time to start working backwards up the face. The long pointed “cheek” piece were next to add so a couple of teardrop shaped pieces were mixed and added point downwards to these areas. They were then flattened shaped and teased into the right sort of shape with my chisels cut and pointed colour shapers. The chisel cut one is great for getting a smooth shiny finish to the putty (this is basically round like the rubber found on the end of a pencil but cut across on an angle and much smaller). Anyway this involved lots of turning the piece back and forth from side to side to make sure both sides looked the same (only opposite of course). Once I was happy with these, I added a ridge running up the middle of each top to bottom. This is where the next thicker layer will go, but I’ll get to that next time. I then added another blob of putty to the top of the head and smoothed this so that it blended into the cheek pieces. I then added the eye holes and some details around them.

The wide “ruff” around his neck came next, this was just another sausage of putty tapered at both ends them laid across the back of his neck and curved down and around the sides over the rear edge of the cheek pieces, much checking and blending later and this was in place. Then with the putty I had left I added the “support sausage”* behind this that will be covered over and tidied up tomorrow.

Right a fairly simple day today, as I said above I just had to blend the back of Battle Cats helmet in, so a strip of putty was laid over the “support sausage” I added yesterday and it was blended in at the top back of the “ruff”. I also added a disk of putty at the front of the “ruff”, and then added two small spikes of putty to this.

Well that’s both heads finished now, I suppose I’ll have to start on the saddles next! So till them, stay safe and cheers Roger.

• (Please note the term “Support Sausage”, is now trademarked to me!)😉