Aunt Root is a character in my soon-to-be-online webcomic, The Mermaid. She’s a rather crusty character (with a heart of gold, or at least really good brass), and because of her unusual looks, I decided to make a maquette of her to understand how her face was put together.

Like all my character maquettes so far, I started her with an armature of wire for stability and aluminum foil for bulk, covered with Super Sculpey polymer clay. I don’t know why I don’t have any pictures of her in her building stages, but I do have one picture of her about to go into the oven with Spam for her initial firing — she looks a bit like Jean Luc Picard from Star Trek Next Generation! At this point I had not year put her hair and clothing on her. I wanted to try using coloured clay for that instead of the pinkish-brown Super Sculpey, which works well for lighter skin tones, but has to be painted for any other colour.

Then I had fun rolling out the coloured clay to make her shirt and her bandana, and rolling really skinny worms blended from brown and silver for her hair, which I attached to her head (before the bandana) and then added further shaping with a tool.

Now she’s ready for painting the final details.

These photos are a little off on the colour (her cheeks aren’t really that blush-y) because I had to do it under my work lights, which are incandescent. I could have waited for daylight, but I wanted to post this tonight! Such an impatient artist…

Here are a couple of drawings from the upcoming webcomic — they’re just in pencil stage at this point. Aunt Root is starting to become my favourite character, because she’s so colourful, even though she isn’t the protagonist! I think I’m going to have to give her her own comic later on — I’m sure she’s had many, many adventures in her life.