Onyx's Body


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I started in on the body after the head - but before the head was done. (For the most part it was the horns, and molding them, that was the big delay.) The body itself was initially to be pretty simple, being merely a unitard that I painted, but eventually I decided to integrate the muscle suit into it. But the body is more than just a torso. It's a kind of catch-all that includes the arms, legs, hands, and feet - and, of course, the torso. While in some ways the most straightforward part of the costume, it still required some thought and engineering.

There's relatively few pictures here, though, because progress was mostly a matter of figuring out how to do specific things. Once that was done, things went fairly fast. As always, you can click on the pictures for a larger (if still blurry) view. I really need a better camera...

The Hands The Feet The Rest


The first thing I did when starting work on the body was to work on Onyx's claws. After a lot of thought, I decided to go with five-fingered hands. Since Onyx is not furred, the fabric that I use for his skin will hide few contours - contours like two digits inside one glove finger. Rather than bother engineering a way to hide it, I just shrugged and kept things as they really are.

That done, I started shaping some claws sized to my fingers out of Sculpy. As you can see, there's a piece that projects backwards over my fingernail. That's to prevent the claw from flopping upwards when I grab something. They still do, of course, but not much. Certainly not as much as they would without that thing there.

Making them didn't take long, and after baking they were easily molded. No problems here, unlike the horns; the claws are small and sturdy. I did have some problems with air holes when I cast them, since I only made one hole for the plastic to enter and air to leave, and it frankly wasn't large enough. A small, flexible rubber tube was the solution, though I still had to recast a few of them. And that gave the white plastic claws you can see in the first picture.

After that, it was time to paint. I sprayed them liberally with flat black paint, and then drybrushed on a double layer of acrylic interference paints, blue and then violet. With a layer of floor varnish to resist scrapes and chips, the claws themselves were done.


Then came the tricky part. Making gloves isn't easy. I tried to take apart a set and use their pattern, but that somehow was a dud. So I just plopped my hand on some fabric and traced around it. I cut it out with liberal extra fabric around the edges, plopped my hand back on it, and started pinning a large piece of fabric to it around my hand and fingers. It took a while, and I had to move pins a lot, and take in areas on the back of my hand... but it did work.

The super-W-shaped pattern is the back of the hand. Sewn together, it's a good glove. There's a zipper up the inside, from about the base of my thumb and six inches up my arm. Without using stretchy fabric, that's the only way I could get it tight to my hand. The simplest pattern of the trio is the part that wraps around my lower forearm.


Then it was time to put them together. I'd made the patterns open-ended, into tubes intead of, well, fingers. So I just had to stick the claws in and glue, right? Well, technically yes, but getting everything just right took a few sessions with a seamripper. The fingers need to be tight to the claws to reduce wrinkles and folds without being so small I can't get the claws in there at all. They also need to be the right length, and despite all my measuring most of them turned out long. But eventually I got it right, and the results are what you see here. It still needed paint, at this point, and possibly something to cover the zipper (the flaps that cover it kept flopping back) but they were functional. They were wearable. Time to move on.


After the hands, it was time for the feet. Feet are, in a way, kind of tricky, since they have to stand up to some potentially serious wear. I also was not up for making a set of digitigrade legs. Not only had I never done them before, but Onyx has no fur to hide the extra padding that gives the jacklegged illusion.

But, I thought, what if he wore clothes? Clothes would give Onyx character; a naked gargoyle (or anything else) is just a gargoyle, but one with ass-kicking boots kicks asses, one with a tie-dyed shirt is a hippie, one in a suit is serious and driven, and so on. So I decided he would wear pants and shoes. No shirt, because Onyx has wings, and I know from experience with Xodiac how hard it is to tailor around them. (The lack of a shirt is a big reason why I decided to try making a muscle suit.) The results of an art commission with some vague guidelines solidified exactly which shoes and pants to get.

So, I started out with some good boots. My feet are size eleven or so, but I bought the largest I could find. That way there would still be room for my feet even after I modified the footwear. The idea was to have a regular boot with the toes cut off, showing Onyx's "real" toes poking out. I cut off the toe area with a hand saw and a dremel, and let me tell you modern boots are tough! The leather was no problem, but the seam bonding it to the sole was not at all easy. A saws-all, I'm sure, would have been the perfect tool here, but I'm not going to buy a three-figure tool for one part of one costume.

I also drilled out the back area with a hole saw for his hind toe. That was no problem whatsoever.


Since only Onyx's toes would be seen, that's all I'd have to make. I used foam, as it is relatively easy to carve and shape with an electric carving knife. (If I ever redo them, I might try styrofoam with a fiberglass stiffener, but this is sufficient for now.) I carved the toes seperately from the ball of the foot, because the shape is just too convoluted otherwise. I expected that to cause some difficulties later, and wasn't disappointed, but I saw no other way.


Of course, just foam wouldn't work. They'd need to be covered with skin. That is, cloth. So I took some paper, cut it up into little bits, and started taping them over the foam to make a form-fitting covering. I then cut it up so it would lie approximately flat. And thus a pattern is born.


With the toes carved, it was time to make the claws. I used basically the same technique as I did with the fingers, making it out of sculpy and then molding them into plastic. But the toes were larger and would be attached differently. That's what the big X was for in the back of each toeclaw.


The toeclaws were painted and covered with varnish, much like the fingerclaws were. Actually, exactly like the fingerclaws. I then carved an X into each foam toe and inserted the claws, along with a liberal dose of glue to hold them together.


I then cut out the cloth as the patterns indicated. I didn't take any pictures of the cloth unsewn, but try to believe me when I say the toes were not just tubes - even if that's pretty much how they look. This is because I failed to glue down the fabric where the curvature of the toes is concave. I may repair that error at some point, or I may not.

With the fabric sewn together, I inserted the toes and then glued the toes to the foot. I did it in that order because the cloth was tight enough to make inserting the toes difficult; with an extra big block of foam behind it to distrubute the force of my fingers, it would have been more difficult still. It was no problem gluing the two pieces of foam together without messing up the cloth. More troublesome was getting the digits in exactly the right place on the foot. This is one of those problems that cropped up due to making the pieces seperate. The other is that the curvature of the back of the toes never exactly matched up to that of the foot, so once it was glued they weren't quite straight.

For the hind claw, I didn't have to worry about that. I did have to sew a piece of fabric to the toe cloth to provide a good surface to glue to the inside of the shoe, however, and that's what that little skirt-like thing is attached to that lone toe.


And lastly, I stuck the fake toes partway into the front of the boot, and gloed around the top edge. It proved too much trouble to glue around the base, so I didn't; if the toes fall out, I can alwys reinsert them and add more glue there. I added dabs of glue to the undersides of each toe, as well. I hadn't wanted to, but it helps compensate for their slightly-off positioning. For the the back toe I simply covered the "skirt" with glue and stuck it into the shoe. No problem whatsoever.

Looking at it taken in whole, it's not bad. It's not great, but it's not bad. The toes are a little long, and so is foot implied by the entire construct. Both would be more appropriate dimensions for a digitigrade creature. Luckily, gargoyles are imaginary, so anatomy that's not quite what we'd expect is excusable. I would perhaps buy a smaller shoe, if I ever do this again, though. Alone, it looks kind of silly. Hopefully, with the full suit, it'll work.


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