Sculpting a Happy Goblin in Clay

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I was just playing when I made this happy goblin character, but I really like the way he came out.

If my next experiment works, he’ll be the daddy goblin in my Halloween display. The original idea of a family of goblins stealing vegetables came from The Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti.

Rossetti’s goblins were mean, but happy – at least in the beginning of the poem. And they had veggies, but she didn’t tell us where they came from. Maybe they stole them from someone’s garden. 🙂

I first read her poem about 65 years ago. I didn’t remember, after all these years, that some of her goblins had animal faces, like owls, rats, etc. I did try making a rat/human goblin face, but I hated it, and started over. I did save one of the ears from that sculpt, though.

Rossetti’s poem has been illustrated by several famous artists. If you’d like to see a great illustration that includes some of her rat-faced goblins, (to me they just look like rats in human clothes), scroll down this page to the Laurence Houseman image.

I’m using Pepy Plastilina Modeling Clay over one of my mannequins that was made smaller by printing the pattern at 60%. You can find my pattern for the mannequin here.

The one part of the rat-faced goblin that I actually liked, other than the ear that I kept, was that he had a sharp face with a long muzzle, so I wanted my human-style goblin to have a long nose, a small chin and an overbite, to kind of bring the front of his face to a point. That was my only criteria when I started on my human-faced goblin.

And, of course, I wanted him to be happy, because he just found an unguarded stash of food, and he and his family are getting away with stealing it. I did an image search online for ‘happy old men,’ and used bits and pieces from about five of them. Then I played around with the clay to get that long, sharp face.

Now, as you read this, you’ll see that there’s no method to my sculpting process, and your art teacher would not approve. I’m just throwing clay on my mannequin to see what happens, just for fun. 🙂

Sculpting the Goblin Face:

I started with a thin strip of clay for his lower lip, added a strip for his chin, and then another thin flat strip for his upper teeth. I added his upper lip and played around a bit to get a smile.

I gave him a very long, overhanging nose and some nostrils.

Then I gave him some laugh muscles.

And then I took off his nose and upper lip, because he didn’t have the overbite I wanted, and his nose didn’t push forward enough.

I stuck on some extra clay and put the mouth and nose back on over it. Now he has the sharp look I was after.

I had to fix the smile muscles, because they didn’t meet up with the nose anymore.

I decided I wanted slanted eyes, so I put some clay over the eye area and carved out the upper and lower lids. This area is very rough now, but I’ll fix that when I smooth off the whole sculpt in the next day or two.

I wanted his eyebrows to be shaggy, and he needed some more clay for his laugh lines.

Then I added enough clay to give him a proper jaw line.

I still had the ear that I kept from the rat-faced goblin I made, so I stuck it on. Then I warmed up my clay and made his other ear, but it was still too warm and it kept falling off. It did eventually cool off enough to stay where it belonged.

I added some clay around the back of his ears, for support.

The second ear fell off several more times until the clay cooled enough. This clay stays warm for a surprisingly long time. That’s really good when you’re sculpting, because it’s easy to move the warm clay around. But his ear is too big and sticks out too much, so the weight of it on the warm clay didn’t work so well. Patience was needed… 🙂

If you have any helpful suggestions before I try using this clay goblin as a model for paper mache, be sure to let me know. I still haven’t decided how the rest of the goblin family will look, or exactly how I’ll make their bodies and clothes, but I have a lot of time to think about it, and I’m already having fun. 🙂