Beauty is in the 11 Eyes

...And the DM said unto them," Be not afraid; for behold, I bring you good tidings of great...Roll for initiative!

Beholder Tree Topper

So, each year we have a big Christmas party, and the Mrs. picks a theme for the tree. This year it was the 25th anniversary of the party, so the theme was silver, which then went to blue and some red... because reasons (did I mention I don't get to pick the theme..)

Anyways, we get the tree into the house and the first thing my daughter asks is," do we have any big googly eyes"- which of course we do, and she proceeds to put them on the tree, proclaiming it a mimic.

And, things kind of went downhill from there. When asked to make this years tree topper, I knew where we were heading.

Beholder: One day build

That's no moon! a 5ish inch foam ball for the base

This build is pretty easy, actually. Armed with my Volo's Guide to Monsters, monster manual and the internets I chose an image that I felt I could achieve pretty well- a classic not too fancy beholder. Having made sculpts like this before where you have to get to a lot of spots with wet clay, the first thing I did was make a stand out of some scrap wood and a dowel. This was, as I later learned, key to actually making this project a success.

punch mouth!

Once I drilled a hole in the ball for the base, eventually the tree stand, I drew in the mouth and main eye, then poked holes and added pipe cleaner eye stalks. In retrospect and if I had more time to shop for materials, I would have used a stiffer sculptors wire.

Cracking toast- Grommit!

  after covering the entire body with a thin 2-3mm layer of Crayola air dry clay, I worked from the eye down to the mouth, then added in mat board teeth. Then I did the eyestalks, and finally adding bits of detail in the way of horns and some armor bits.

Honey! the meatloaf is ready...

I was on a 3 hour deadline as the Mrs was going full bore baking literally 100's of cookies and a few cakes for the party. I had to get this guy into an oven set to 100 degrees over night to speed up the air dry clay.

I could have kept painting, but remember this is going on top of a tree..

The next morning, smiley was dry and ready to be painted. There were some cracks in the eyestalks that I tried cleaning up a bit with liquid green stuff, (see above, should have used wire) and some happy accident cracks all around the body that looks like armor.


I painted him(?) up with a mix of Plakka red and the standard slew of minis paints. All told about an hour to paint up.

I'm on Top of the World! 

That's no tree- it's a mimic!

The prettiest angel!

Done and done, the beholder weighed in at just over a pound, and fit well atop the tree. This was a great one day project that took roughly 4 hours to build. It really helped that I was familiar with the materials and had a good plan, and stand.

Now, what else to do with this after Xmas???

Cheers and cool Yule to all!
Ths