dragonimp

These are progress shots. To see a turnaround for the finished figure, visit PaperDemon, deviantART, or y!gallery (~~was reported to the abuse system (!??) at y!gallery and is currently hidden~~ Been restored. WTF was the problem? No idea.).

It's hard to see from the finished piece just how many steps goes into one of these, so I took some photos along the way. Click the image for a larger view.

It starts with the armature:

They really just look like aliens at this point. But an alien with muscles! I had an anatomy book and a book of stock photos as well as the manga open in front of me.

Next comes the head and face:

This part took about 6 hours. Podcasts are my friend.

The arms and legs ended up being done in 3 separate bakes. The automail actually wasn't a problem; it was his left arm that gave me the headaches:

(It's like somebody's wet dream ^_^ except for being bald.)
Ed took a nosedive in the oven about this point. His arm cracked (which you can see here) but stayed together thanks to the armature, but I had to do emergency surgery to repair his hand. And thus I learned the lesson of always propping the hell out of everything.

Hands are evil in any medium, but they're 10 times worse in polymer clay, because just about the time you get it to look right, the damn clay cracks on you. I didn't have nearly as much trouble with his right hand, I think that white clay was out to get me.