Tutorial - Elias Skull (Ancient Magus Bride) (Patreon)

Hey guys!! Today I will be showing you how I made my Elias skull from the anime/manga "The Anicent Magus' Bride" this was something I have NEVER done before and had to do so much research in order to go about even attempting this so I hope anything I have learned here will help you with creating this or something similar!

WHAT YOU WILL NEED

• Craft Foam (2mm and 5mm)
• Cardboard
• Base face bask
• Tape (can substitute for paper mache)
• Air dry clay 
• Rice light LEDS 
• Acrylic paints
• Springs
• Screws/washers/nuts/screwdriver
• Black tool fabric
• Hot glue/ Glue gun
• Wood glue
• Plastidip
• sandpaper
• Worbla (I used black worbla) 

The first thing I did was cut my base mask in half, this is the starting foundation I decided to use for Elias. With this I would then start to build off it, make sure you have TONS of references for the sculpt you are doing. You will be spending a lot of your time measuring and drawing out the shapes and patterns onto paper before placing them onto your base.

I attached these with hot glue, nothing fancy. Make sure to put on your sculpt everytime you add a few pieces to it to make sure it sits properly on you and that everything looks like a good size and nothing too big. Continue to place your foam around the insides of your base, you are now making the skull frame for Elias! If you need to, sand down the edges of the foam to get a smoother transition between your different pieces.

After I added all the foam I wanted I then wrapped my entire sculpt in tape! This creates an overall smoother layer for the sculpt which will help when we add our final worbla casing around the entire skull.

Next step is the airdry clay, for this part I suggest looking up how a wolfs skull looks like and building it off based on that. Your clay by no means needs to look perfect, you are only doing this to give more structure to your skull.

And now here is the most tedious part, wrapping your skull in worbla. Worbla is a thermoplastic that when heated will turn soft enough for you to do whatever you want with it. For this I took a large sheet of it and placed it atop my sculpt, then I began heating the worbla from above and pressing it down around my Elias head. To get into the deeper corners I use the end of a sharpie to make sure the worbla got in there. This takes quite sometime to do and you will be going back, reheating sections and pressing the worbla down more and more to make sure it is showing all the details for your sculpt. The LEDs were not installed in here yet, I just had them there to show what they looked like.

Bottom jaw time! The way I made the pattern for this was I laid my top skull down on some card board and drew out the side jaw panel onto the cardboard with sharpie! That way I knew it would line up perfectly with the top half. The bottom part of the jaw was basically a triangle with a blunt top shape that I then adhered in between the two pieces of cardboad! Wrap it up in worbla just like how you did the top section and you are done!

Something I forgot to mention earlier is teeth, the teeth for Elias are JUST worbla balls. Basically, any worbla scraps I had laying around I heated up, rolled into a ball and then shaped in to looking like teeth. After I heated up where I wanted to place me teeth on the skull and shoved them into place and held them down till the worbla cooled off.

This part was something I have to thank the furry community for, hinges! I wanted my Elias skull to be able to ope and close its mouth

In order to this I made these V shaped hinges out of worbla and attached them to the top and bottom parts of my skull. A screw, washer and knut were used to keep them into place and a small spring was placed on the top and bottom sides of my skull, this is so that when I open my mouth the spring will cause the skull to come back together when I talk!

The horns are made out of one layer of 5mm craft foam and covered with layers of 2mm craft foam to get that dimension to his horns. They were each then covered with worbla and attached to the base skull! Worbla sticks to itself SUPER SUPER well, so I never needed any glues to attach things together that were covered with worbla. 

And with that, Elias skull was done! Well, the process of putting it together was done!

Worbla has a really bumpy texture and we want to make sure to get rid of that before painting our skull. The way I did it was with four layers of wood glue! Wood glue is fantastic primer for worbla and is the fastest way imo to get it smooth. I used a sponge brush and covered my skull in multiple layers of worbla and when one layer was dry I took sandpaper and went over everything and then repeated the process for a few more layers. Make sure the glue is FULLY dried before moving onto the next layer.

Before painting I covered the entire skull in Plastidip, this is an AMAZING primer that helps smooth out the worbla even more and also makes a fantastic base for when you are painting. For the paint I used basic acrylic paints in brown, dark brown, black and yellow. I did a dry brush method to paint the skull to give it that old bone look, when dry brushing you want to dip your brush in paint, rub it against your pallete and then do small lines where you wish to contour your skull, then take your finger, dip it in water and rub out the paint to get your desired contour/shade.

Last part, his eyes! The base of his eyes are a small glob of hot glue I put down on some glass and then pealed off. You want a nice small bead of glue for this. For the under edges I took a small amount of red paint and gently painted the sides of it. While the paint on that was drying I grabbed my black tool fabric, cut a square out and glued it to the inside of the eye holes and took my LED rice lights and lined the inside of the skull with the wire so it would lay right in the center of the eye. I then took my eyes base and hot glued it down atop the black tool/LED light. YOU NEED the hot glue eye bead part, without it I find the LED light looks dull and odd but with the hot glue bead off it the light illuminates the glue bead and it looks more like a glowing iris then just a random light.

And with that we are done! As always if you have anymore questions on how I made this, something you want me to talk about more just let me know!