Making of the light-up Vader sculpture

protemus
Oct 25
9 min read

The Idea

For a time, we had a lovely addition to our household, an exchange student who was a great person and a fantastic artist. Once, in passing, she had mentioned that she wanted a Darth Vader figure. I set about making one for her (which turned into a years-long project that I’d put down and pick up again many many times).

The idea was attractive to me because I’ve wanted to get into fantasy and comic book figure sculpting for a while. A goal of mine has been to create a really detailed, large size (18-inches or so) Spider-Man sculpture (haven’t done it yet, but when I do it’ll be epic). Darth was a good foray into the style/size. This particular idea was a challenge for several reasons. First, it would be the only full-body human figure I’d done (except for the humanoid gargoyles, they don’t count). But also because it included parts that were supposed to look manufactured, even and symmetrical rather than organic (the helmet, armor and control panels).

I put several criteria on the sculpture right from the beginning.

I wanted an action pose. The world is full of Darth Vader figures standing straight holding his light saber forward with two hands. Or standing straight with one outstretched hand air-choking some absent victim. I wanted a younger athletic Vader. And not just in an action pose but mid-fight. Like he is about to swing his light saber to cleave some poor teenage jedi in two pieces that slide apart slowly as he pivots to decapitate a baby or something.
I wanted to evoke the image of a Samurai. That is, after all, what Vader was originally based on.
I wanted the light saber to light up and for the finished product to look really cool in the dark.
I wanted the cape to be a focal point of the sculpture. I really wanted to try to capture the cape and make it look like it was flowing mid-action.
I wanted to hand sculpt the entire thing from top to bottom.

To start out I needed to plan the size. So I scoured the internet for a 3D model of vader standing straight up that I liked the proportions of to use as a guide. Then I screenshot a front and side view orthographic projection and overlaid it onto the normal wire guide I use for forming figure armatures. Then I printed it out at exact size (12 inch height) and used it to cut my armature wire.

Sculpting the mask

I figured that the best way to get a correctly proportioned vader was to sculpt and cast the helmet first. That way I could stick the solid helmet on the top of the clay figure and eyeball the proportions to make adjustments to the body.

I found a 3d model of vader on the internet that I liked the proportions of and I printed out multiple helmet views in orthographic projection at exact size for the 12 inch figure height (left).

Freehand sculpting something so exacting and precise as a helmet, is extremely difficult. So I needed to find a good base that I could cover with clay.

For this I cut up a plastic drizzle thing (don’t ask me what they are called. They are used for pouring patterns in epoxy and paint) and a small styrofoam ball. I cut them up with the Dremel and mounted a stick on it and covered it in clay. Then I smoothed it out and added a brim and the helmet stripe down the middle.

Then I separately sculpted the mask, making sure the eye size and nose/chin distance were consistent with the mask images I printed out actual size.

Then I molded and cast each of the 2 pieces separately. The idea was that after I had resin copies of the helmet and the mask, I could dremel out the inside of the helmet, put the two pieces together and voila! A finished vader mask. Yeah. No. That wasn’t the end of it. The proportions were all wrong. It turns out that people are subconsciously very familiar with the exact look of Vader's helmet. You aren’t sure exactly what is wrong, but you know something is wrong. It just looked goofy. The angle of the helmet slope was all wrong, the brim was too big or too small, the eyes looked funky, his nose was too far out, etc. etc.

So. I basically molded and cast the assembled mask like 20 times, making small adjustments each time. Here are some pics of some of the various versions.

Eventually, I got to a mask that I liked the look of. This one on the left. It wasn’t perfect, and to be honest, I even modified and remolded/cast this one once more before using it.

Creating the shape of the body

After a ton of research online of various samurai art, I finally settled on a pose where Vader is pivoting and, flinging his cape around his body, his right arm cocked back and his left hand reaching two go into a two handed swing.

I used this image for the upper part of the body as inspiration. Kudos to the artist. I tried to track down the original artist and I believe it was originally posted by the DeviantArt account Brolo.

Of course, the standard challenges with sculpting something like that by hand in clay apply. I don’t outsource my mold creation, so the molds would be an extremely challenging part of this.

My first consideration was to get the proportions right. I had pre-sculpted the helmet separately and I wanted to make sure the helmet was the right size proportional to the body. I didn’t want it to look all Dark Helmety or to be slightly too small for the body. And I had a target size of of around ⅙ scale (about 12 inches) for the figure height.

So I scoured the internet for a 3D model of vader standing straight up that I liked the proportions of. Then I screenshot a front and side view orthographic projection and overlaid it onto the normal wire guide I use for forming figure armatures. Then I printed it out at exact size (12 inch height) and used it to cut my armature wire. Below are the printouts that I made as guides.

Next I built my armature. For this I used steel wire. Yes, I know people use aluminum wire for its bendy properties. I do too. But for this particular sculpture I wanted a significant amount of strength with a thinner profile than I would get with braiding aluminum wire. I wouldn’t be bending it so much where I would risk the steel wire breaking and the thing would be holding a lot of clay weight and I didn’t want it to sag. When I create armatures from wire I add some 2 part epoxy to set the non-bendable areas and to give me a visual indication of where the muscles are in the initial pose. This has the added benefit of keeping the aluminum foil from slipping when I use it to bulk up the model. Then I pose it and start bulking it up with aluminum foil. Using aluminum foil initially helps save on the amount of clay I use and reduce the weight. It is also soft enough that I can change it after adding clay by just pressing harder to compress it.

Creating the electronics and armor

Now that the main body shape is there I needed to create the armor and the various devices Vader has all over him. If I created them the correct size I could mold/cast them hard and then just stick them on the clay body and sculpt around them for the rest. But I needed lines that just aren’t achievable in clay. For this I turned to lego. I cut up tons of pieces of lego for the buttons and then used clay to bind them all together. Here are some shots of the process. As you can see, I not only used lego to shape some of the electronics, but I also used it to make the mold boxes!

The lightsaber (an exercise in trial and error)

I split the lightsaber into 2 parts: the electronic part and the blade. For the electronic part I used a metal bolt that i wrapped in black electrical tape to get the differing levels. Then I used clay to build the top and the various electronic parts. And actual wires for the wires. Then I molded and cast it. Below is a version I painted as an example of what it would look like.

The blade was a little more complicated. I intended to embed the wires through the final cast and hook it up to the blade which would have a single ended LED filament in it to light up. None of the casts I tried worked. And I tried a LOT of different casts.

In the end, I just decided to 3D print the blade in hollow translucent red and slide the LED strip into it.

Back to the body

Yes, I know I skipped a bunch of steps here but I was on a roll and didn’t take any photos of the intermediate steps of attaching the armor and filling out the body. It was all straight clay sculpting.

You can see above that I first sculpted the clothes smooth with their folds and wrinkles before I added the leather pattern.

The leather pants and shirt pattern was added next.

Then I started adding the flowing fabric.

The flowing skirt is actually a second cape that only goes down Vader’s sides. This is an intermediate shot. I changed the folds multiple times before I was happy with them. I started with a diaper fold in the middle going from one side to the other but ultimately that didn’t mesh with the action pose. It made the skirt look like it was hanging when the rest of him was in a rotational motion.

The cape

For the cape I went without any armature. I figured since I was using Medium hardness clay, that the body would give me enough of a support structure for the free flowing parts to support themselves. As it turned out, it was enough and didn’t sag. For inspiration I scoured the internet for various pictures of people wearing capes. And I filmed a cloth being flung in a rotational motion like 300 times and found a few frames that captured the look I was going for.

I threw in a couple diaper folds where it was up at the top of the shoulders and then just freehand carved the rest of the folds until they looked natural to my eye.

I also cheated near the bottom. If you look closely, the folds on the back of the cape near the bottom don’t match up with the front of the cape… unless the cape is actually about 3 feet thick there and made of jello. It was necessary to give the bottom of the sculpture some thickness and stability. I hid it in such a way that you don’t notice it unless you are looking for it.

Molding and Casting the full size sculpture

I decided to make a multi-part mold using silicone for the main mold and ArtKast Resin for the outer hard mother mold shell. The first coat of silicone I brush on without thickener to make sure I get in all the crevices to capture all the detail. Then I build up the silicone in layers creating ridges where I am going to eventually divide the mother mold. The silicone inner mold ends up looking like this:

Then I make shallow slits in the ridges and insert plastic keying sheets into the slits and connect them with UV resin (to glue the plastic key sheets together).

Then I paint on the mother mold in sections. Eventually, I drill pilot holes in the sections to allow them to be held together with screws and wingnuts for pouring.

The mold ended up being 8 pieces. The mistakes I made were many. I should have pre separated the arms with keyed silicone instead of cutting the silicone there. And the cape was way too thin to properly cast. With some care, I do get a good cast out of it. But there is a lot of repair work after the cast to make it usable.

The smaller version

The large version is fine, but bulky and heavy and expensive to reproduce. So I 3D scanned the entire sculpture and then sliced it into parts with keyed joins. Then 3D printed the parts for sanding, joining and painting. As with all my 3D printed sculptures, I took extra care to be as true to the original sculpture as possible. I even left in imperfections in the sculpture that happened during the sculpting process. If an imperfection occurred because of the casting process, I do touch those up. (seams and bubbles, etc..). In the case of vader I went a tad bit further and edited the breast plate and belt electronics to be more precise. I also joined the helmet and did a little adjustment to make it more symmetrical. But, except for those adjustments, the 3D printed version is identical to the original (but smaller). I also created a base via 3D editing so Vader would have something to stand on.