Worms Mayhem!

Christmas break was awesome!  I finally got to do some art for the fun of it.  I used Sculpey to portray the epic battles my brothers and I hammer out monthly on the PC.  Worms is a video game that's been around since the 90's.  You take turns controlling a customisable team of worms.  You can dress your team with 3d glasses, facial hair, crazy hats etc. You also get an artillery of humorous weapons (like mad cows and concrete donkeys) to unload on each other.  Worms Mayhem is my favorite version, where the levels are all 3D, as opposed to the classic 2D and revisited 2D versions (which are also a lot of fun).  So much of our brotherly bonding time centers around Worms that I wanted to capture the fun in a piece of art.  I've also got to advertise to you that you can buy Worms Ultimate Mayhem on Amazon for less than $4.

This is Star, the leader of my youngest brother's team.  He claims the highest lookout points in the game by constantly using jet packs. Once atop his perch, he delights in throwing gigantically explosive banana bombs.

Don't mess with Cheeks, he's my main man... err, worm.  I start almost every round using a ninja rope to push toxic canisters up to my opponents.  The barrels amp up the strength of a shot from my bazooka.  Once I pull the trigger, I prove that worms can fly without jet packs.

Leemur #1... for now.  My middle brother (let's call him Al--short for Alien) renames his worms almost every time we play, so I can hardly keep track of them .  Al is the king of random.  Once upon a time he witnessed his worm get abducted by aliens.  His worm came out of the spaceship completely blue and naked.  Al laughed so hard he almost fell out of his chair.  I will forever remember him as a blue worm, no matter how many crazy hats, night vision goggles, handle bar moustaches, or bling bling rings he sports.  In the image above, we see Alien winding up with a giant tail nail hammer.  This weapon is typically used for smashing an opponent into the ground, but today the reaction will probably turn this worm into a shooting star.  As long as Al does something crazy and entertaining, he feels like he wins the game.

This is the first time I actually did some concept art before jumping into the sculpting process.  When I was younger, I used to sculpt lots of things with Sculpey.  It's great because it cooks in the oven at 325°F and it never gets hard until you cook it.  

I used dowels, balsa wood, bailing wire and a 1/2" thick wooden base to provide the structure I needed.  I was super excited to sculpt the jet pack fire and smoke.  To avoid some difficult painting details, I used Adobe Illustrator and simply printed out glasses, moons and stars for the wizard hat etc. 

I used a spray can of white primer as an undercoat for the worms.  I painted them with some leftover acrylic paints from my college days, and then I glued on the printed graphics.

Originally, I tried to follow the concept art background sketch by putting the worms against a night time view of Doom Canyon.  I painted the image in Photoshop and printed it out.  When I saw the paper in the back of my shadow box, it was way too dark to compliment the sculptures, so I painted a day time version instead.  The complete project (sculpting, painting, digital painting) took about 25 or 26 hours.  I had so much fun!