The Devourer

The whopping size, end of year Prog of 2000AD has just been and gone and highlight, by a very great distance, was the prologue of "Aquila" by Gordon Rennie and Leigh Gallagher, which is being touted in some places as a very loose reboot of "Black Hawk" from Tornado of the early 80's.
Like i say, for sure the best thing in the Prog, and Leigh's 2 page, widescreen shot of the Roman's landing in England is jaw-droppingly fantastic.
Shame its a taster and the actual tale won't start for a while.
Anyway, Leigh's just put up a fascinating script to finished piece on his Blog:

http://leighgallagherart.blogspot.com/

Which includes various design options for a Eygptian demon baddie for the tale, which are all great, but i really like his final version, which seems to be able to open up a la Rob Bottin's "Thing" designs.
Liked it so much that i thought i'd have a go at making the final, opened up version.
Looking at it, the body and whatever the heck that is coming out look okay to do, but i'm pretty rubbish at sculpting hands and feet.
So i thought i'd cheat and use a donor figure for them.
At first i considered something by Games Workshop or those nifty, well designed and painted European toy figures in my local toyshop, but they were all too small.
But then i came across this old vinyl figure from the Guyver Anime, that's literally been sitting in a box for the past 20 years:

His arms and legs looked a close match so i snapped them off - easy to break 20 year-old Superglue. And it was a nice surprise to find that the arms could be put into almost exactly the same pose that Leigh had them in. You can see here also that i've made a start on cutting off the thickest of the hair detail. The rest will be covered up by a layer of clay. And i've also removed the elbow and knee spikes:

Here's the legs standing up and by themselves. I'm happy with the feet and toes, but both sections of leg are far too long. I can get round the upper part by simply imbedding a portion of them into the body, but the lower part needed a section cutting out, which i've done here, then glueing the stump onto the knee:

Below you can see i've covered up the join with Milliput. The body i'm guessing will be pretty heavy and the legs, being vinyl and hollow, will collapse either straight away or over time.
To get round that, i've first plugged the holes in the knees with Blu Tac, then filled each leg with Plaster Of Paris. Before it set, i moved the legs to what i thought would be the right distance apart, then put in this piece of wire, which is the first step in building up the body: