Chapter 10 - CENTAURS - Abraxas

This advanced-level project will teach you how to make a Centaur, based on the skills you picked up with the previous project in the book - making a horse's body. What makes this a little more complicated is the fact that the Centaur has 8 limbs (4 legs, 2 arms, 1 head, and a tail) so it feels like making an Octopus while you twist the armature for the wire. But for those of you who like a little challenge, as long as you stick with the project (involves multiple bakings) the patience really pays off. We show how to make a semblance of an anatomically correct torso from a bunch of balls of clay of different size - a complex looking end result from a series of no-brainer steps. We made our Centaur a little buff, so you can use this project to make as an extension a Hercules.

Chapter 9 - UNICORNS - Igrif Belcon

In this chapter we show how to make a unicorn - which is, before you put in the magic, a white horse with a horn in the middle of his forehead. We show how to make a skeleton out of wire and tinfoil for a quadrupled creature, which will also come in handy for the making of the Centaur in Chapter 10.

I will let you in on a little secret, an inside joke: the name we picked for this creature, although it has a somewhat Nordic ring to it, is actually a pun - Igrif Belcon means "playful white horse" pronounced with a certain Bulgarian dialect. We laughed our heads off when Boris came up with this, good times... The moral of the story is that when working with clay it's always good to try and have a good time - if the claying becomes too onerous, or you don't seem to get it right again and again, don't get frustrated, squish everything if you have to (that's how you get the grotesque look) and you can start over when your mood brightens.