goblin tinkerer
mixed media
Process
I got my hands on some marbles and I thought they would make wonderful eyeballs in a sculpture.
I experimented with clay first, sculpting something that vaguely resembles a dragon’s head, but soon reverted back to my beloved true and tried papier-mâché to sculpt the goblin. Starting from a toilet paper roll, some wooden golftees for the shape, masking tape and wads of newspaper. Covered the whole guy in papier-mâché, painted him in various shades of swamp green and, lightly inspired by Aemond Targaryen, gave him an eye scar. At this point, I wasn’t sure if he’d be a pirate ballooneer or a tinkerer, so there were plans for an eye patch never came to fruition. I then sewed a little leather apron thingy for him. From an empty tiny plastic paint bucket and some leather scraps, I made him some triple functionality headgear for piloting, welding and magical vision enhancement for his bad eye.
The original idea was to have him fly an aircraft that was essentially a bathtub hooked up to a balloon. For the bathtub, I was going to use one of those cardboard kidney dishes you get in the hospital, but eventually decided against it in favour of a cola bottle, for no other reason than really wanted to build something with a cola bottle.
I thrifted a Combined Toys metal construction set for building a toy airplane and used some of the parts to install functional wheels onto the bottle. I then papier-machéd the whole thing and painted it to resemble something I’m not sure of whether it’s supposed to be wood, metal or plastic myself. I added some parts from the aircraft set as a dashboard and flightstick/steering wheel as well as the iron parts from clothespins as pedals. Not sure how exactly that works but let’s say it’s goblin magic we as mere humans cannot understand.
My goblin needed to sit, so I got something resembling an egg carton that I think used to be packaging for a headset and cut out a piece that already looked like a chair. I then covered the chair in leather and sewed little cushions from leather and filled them with a little bit of plushie stuffing. Added some padding to the chair made from leftover foam wrapping, then glued the whole thing down with the goblin on top.
For the balloon, I sewed a plushie cover around a protein shake type drinking bottle I thrifted specifically because I loved the shape for a steampunky zeppelin balloon thingy. I attached some plastic toy parts and parts of wooden spoons for a propellor on the back of the balloon, and used an aluminium dessert plate and a wooden golftee glued to it for the pointy front, then painted everything in my best impression of “rusty”.
For the balloon itself, I used felt scraps I had left over from a couple of thrifted owl mobile crafting sets. I started out with a thick yarn to make it look cartoonish, but that didn’t look good on the balloon, so I started over with a thinner stitch. Came up a little short in felt pieces and turned that bug into a feature by adding a piece of a zipper from a gifted sweater that wasn’t my size. Stuffed the whole thing with plushie stuffing, the weirdest plushie ever.
Then came the tricky part. The balloon somehow had to be attached to the gondola, and it had to look like the balloon was flying and the gondola dangling from it. I figured I had to do that with rope, though as you know, rope has the quality of being quite limp and not at all in the business of supporting heavy objects on top of them, so I built an iron wire support system for it, then spent way too much time threading the iron wire through the rope to make it look like the rope was going around the balloon, thus the balloon holding up the gondola and not the other way around. With an unholy amount of super glue, I attached the bottom of the iron wires to some metal hooks I attached to the gondola with an unholy amount of superglue earlier. After adding another layer of superglue for good measure and being assured
Gave my little friend his gigantic tinkering tool, it’s a bit rusty but it still works! Added some details to the ropes, made a barrel with cogs and a box with screws for the cargo hold, as well as some anchor thingy. Some glider wings for more aerodynamics minmaxing, a ladder so he can get into the ship and some dirt to finish off the whole thing.
What’s left to do:
- Decorate the gondola with:
- sandbags?
- text + logo?
- dirt wash
Materials
- Papier-mâché (newspaper, wallpaper paste)
- Acrylic paint
- Cardboard (cereal boxes, toilet paper rolls)
- Glue, wood glue, plastic glue, superglue
- Marbles
- Cola bottle
- Various screws, nuts and bolts
- Combined Toys metal airplane set
- Leather scraps
- Plushie stuffing
- Foam scraps
- Felt scraps from mobile kit
- Plastic protein shake bottle
- Fabric
- Zipper
- Iron wire
- Iron part from clothespins
- Plastic toy parts, plastic toy tools