Graduate Project
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For my university Graduate Project I decided to create a miniature of a scene and have it based on a book. The book I chose was 'The Mark of Athena' by Rick Riordan. The scene chosen was the dwelling of the monster Arachne, where she guarded the Athena Parthenos. Above are some of the photographs I took of my final model. Both before and after adding the cobwebs that are covering the area as well as two different light colours (Flames in the braziers).
Design Stage
At the beginning of my Project I went through the book and found the elements that are described to be within the scene.
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Of these elements, I started thinking of ways they could all fit together as well as look good on their own.
Designing the Athena Parthenos was tricky, however designs and other sources of what the statue might have looked like did help with knowing what elements should be specific to the statue.
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The monster that the hero has to face within the scene is Arachne, who was challenged by Athena to a weaving competition as Arachne was rumoured to be better than Athena. Arachne won and in spite Athena turned her into a half human half spider hybrid monster. So within the scene there are 5 mentioned tapestries that have been made by Arachne out of her web. these gave me some creative freedom to decide how they would look.
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Digital Stage
After I had designed the Tapestries I went into photoshop to draw them up digitally, not all are finished although this allowed me to practice my concept art skills. This stage was done along side the construction stage.
Later on in the book, above the surface, the fly-able ship called the Argo II hovers above. The heroes on the ship blow aa hole in the car park on the surface down to the cavern below.
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This made me decide to also design the Argo II. Once I had used the fan wiki page about the ship (since the details about the ship are scattered across a few books) I was able to make a basic floor plan of how I thought it would be. I then went into Sketch up to draw this floor plan up digitally, all three below decks of the sip (excluding the top deck with the wheel).
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Instead of a typical masthead, there is the bronze head of a mechanical flying dragon called Festus who was whole, in a previous book. For this I used a new sculpting software within Vr called Kodon. I Unfortunately had some difficulties as it's still in development and encountered bugs. So I wasn't able to to use all features it provides, however would really like to use it again.
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Construction Stage
This last stage was the most fun for me during this project, creating a miniature set.
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I made the rock walls out of foam, used a knife and a rock to make the foam look as much like a natural rock surface as I could. The rock is the same technique I saw used on the making of The Lord of the Rings Trilogy.
After painting the walls, the next stage was to create the floor. I did this with a 2 step crackle medium I got from B&Q, creating a stencil out of frog tape after the first step, painting the colours then adding the 2nd step, which was really just a protective coat.
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Whilst I was making the cavern walls and floor I was also sculpting out the Athena Parthenos using Super Sculpey. This took a lot of stages to finish as you can easily smash any detail you've just done by moving onto another part and accidentally gripping the detail. Because of this it needs to be baked after each major detail element has been sculpted and unfortunately this takes up time.
I also used Super Sculpey to create the Bronze Braziers, as well as copper wire for the feet, epoxy resin for the oil fuel source and flickering light bulbs from cheap electric tea candles, dismantled and fixed in the epoxy.
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The last element in the space not yet mentioned are the columns. technically they aren't mentioned in the book, however I decided to add them because i thought the cavern could be an old Roman temple that had been lost. The fact that another smaller temple was encountered earlier in the book, in the same area helps to enforce my idea of it being a larger lost temple. The columns that I chose to use were Ionic, they have been seen in Athena Temples in Greece and so fit well. I also thought to have Roman Ionic columns around the edges of the space, and Greek Ionic closer to the Athena Parthenos statue as it is said that it radiates power.
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