Carl Swangee is the robot detective protagonist of Penny Arcade’s noir Automata series. He’s been on my list of characters to sculpt for some time, but as is often the case, this project started half by accident. While buying supplies for another project, I picked up some NSP Chavant as I heard it was a popular sculpting material and wanted to try it out. Watching television one evening, I started idly kneading a lump of the clay and found I had something roughly the shape of Carl’s head, so refined it and continued sculpting from there. I’ve worked on this project on-and-off for several years, making bursts of progress before setting it aside for long periods. At the start of the pandemic I put Carl back out on my desk, determined that the next time he was set on a shelf would be for display purposes.

When sculpting Elizabeth, my first sculpt, I found that the face and hair were the most challenging parts, and wanted to get more comfortable with the overall sculpting process before focusing on improving these areas. This quickly moved Carl up my list since his head is a featureless dome! With Elizabeth, who was sculpted in Sculpey, I completely finished and baked each piece before moving on to the next, working from her feet upwards. Using Chavant, there is no baking or curing of the clay, so it always remains workable, allowing everything to be roughed out before refining the details. I set the scale for the piece based on the head (he's 9" tall - about 1/8th scale), printing out a skeleton as reference and using it to build an armature with wire. I emedded the armature into a block of wood and defined the pose before building up the shape with clay.

I used fine wire mesh as the base for the tails of his trench coat, layering it with clay and blending it into the torso. I used the same mesh to give some support to his tie, though this piece still proved pretty delicate. With the overall shape in place, I began filling in the detail. I found the coat to be the most challenging part of the project, and spent a lot of time looking at reference trying to figure out how cloth wrinkles and falls so that each sculpted fold would look correct.

Carl’s gun is the smallest replica I have made to-date, based on the M1911 pistol, built from thin sheets of styrene, finely cut and shaped with files. The gun was molded and cast before sculpting his hand around a cleaned-up casting. His left hand is open, and the fingers were quite delicate, making sculpting the robotic plates and joints frustrating at times, but I’m happy with the final result. I included the mechanical details on his wrists, though these are mostly hidden by his sleeves. In one frame of the comic series, Carl can be seen wearing cog cuff links, so I made sure to add them.

I knew from the beginning that I would eventually need to separate the coat tails from the body, both to give me access to the lower body for sculpting, and for molding, but it was a nerve-wracking process cutting through all my hard work and pulling the pieces apart. Once separated, I cleaned up the lines so the pieces would be easier to fill and blend together on the final casting. As with the coat, I studied plenty of reference to see how trousers move, paying particular attention to how wrinkles interact with seams and the crease down the front. The rough shoe shape was refined and panels, soles and laces added to give him a pair of classic Oxfords.

Once all parts were finished and given several passes of smoothing and cleaning, it was time to mold. I decided to seal the clay before molding to lessen the chance of damage, and gave everything a spray of gloss varnish. I had some issues with this finish however, as parts of it lifted and softened the Chavant when I went to pour the second halves of the molds. I think this was caused by the moisture in the water-based clay I use for building the mold boxes, so will have to investigate alternatives for future projects. Despite this, the molds worked fine, and the castings came out relatively clean.

With a full set of castings, I started the process of finishing and painting before getting to final assembly. The first step was to sand, prime and smooth everything, cleaning up any mold lines or voids left by the casting process. I always use Rust-oleum spray primer and have usually found it reliable in the past, but had issues when preparing Carl. After working through the process of priming, waiting for the primer to cure, sanding through increasing grits of sandpaper, the final coat of primer would soften the previous coats, so that handling the piece would leave dents and the paint could be peeled off with a fingernail. This happened several times, and I had to strip everything down to the base plastic and start again each time. The other complication with painting was black paint. Games Workshop’s Chaos Black spray paint is my go-to, and since essentially everything on this piece is black, I needed a lot of it. This was at the height of the pandemic lockdown, and getting my hands on Chaos Black was challenging, bringing the project to a halt with Carl half-painted as I waited to get more.

With so much black on the piece, I used several different finishes and techniques to differentiate the various pieces. The shoes were airbrushed with Alclad gloss black to give them the look of patent leather, with the soles and laces brushed with a flat acrylic black. A standard technique for weathering hard surfaces is to apply metallic paint at edges to simulate paint chipping, but I felt that Carl is built from some kind of sci-fi plastic or ceramic rather than metal, so instead weathered the edges of his robotic panels with blended coats of grey to give the impression of wear. For the coat, one idea was to pick out some of the raised folds with grey edge highlights to mimic the inking of the comic panels, but after applying the basecoat of matte black I was happy with how the details of the coat picked up the light and left it at that. One additional finish was used for the black of the lamppost: to make it look like weathered wrought iron, I carefully went over the black basecoat with a graphite pencil, picking out edges and adding marks and scratches that would have built up over time. I used a similar approach to achieve the gunmetal finish of the pistol, but was much more liberal with the pencil, so that the whole part had a metallic sheen.

The trousers were airbrushed with a few layers of brown and khaki, subtly picking out some of the higher detail in lighter shades. Since I would have reduced access later, this was done before gluing and blending in the coat tails, and masked off to protect it while I finished the rest of the painting. The white parts were undercoated with grey before airbrushing with white. For the face and hand panels I built up the white as a flat coat, but on the shirt I blended it up from the base coat to leave some shadows in the creases. Once all the painting was done, I sprayed a coat of matte varnish over the robot parts to further differentiate the surface finish from the rest of the piece.

From the beginning, I had planned on adding some lighting to the piece. By chance, the scale I had sculpted Carl’s head at was perfect to use 5mm LEDs as his eyes, the lens of the LED perfectly mimicking the look complex robotic optics. Before painting, I drilled out his eye sockets, up through his neck, as well as a channel through his body and out through his foot to run wire. I used some ice blue LEDs left over from building Tracer’s Pulse Pistols, but had to sand down the lip at the base of each LED to get them to fit. Once the head had been painted and sealed I was able to glue them in and see what Carl looked like with eyes for the first time.

All good noir detectives should stand by a lamppost, and Carl’s stance and flowing coat tails had been sculpted with this in mind. The lamppost was fabricated out of styrene, using the plastic bodies of marker pens for the cylindrical post, and Warhammer bits and Lego pieces for details like the cross bars and lamp top. The fogged glass was achieved by sanding sheets of clear acrylic and sandwiching them together, leaving the outer surface unsanded so it still looks like smooth glass. I took the flickering LED out of an LED tea light and wired it into the lamppost, giving the piece an extra bit of mood and movement. After assembly, the lamppost was weathered with coats of brown and black ochre powders to give the effect of years of street dirt accumulating in its recesses.

The base is made with layered sheets of MDF, with a cavity cut out for the batteries and wiring. Magnets were used to hold the styrene sheet cover for battery access in place. As well as a power switch, I included a dimmer to control the brightness of the eyes. The pavement was built with styrene sheets, chipped and weathered with blades and files before undercoating with textured paint. Fine gravel was glued to the base for the corner of road.

The pavement was airbrushed with a mix of browns and greys, then drybrushed with lighter greys and weathered with the same brown/black ochre mix I used elsewhere. The road was drybrushed with some darker greys before weathering with the ochre powders.

With everything painted and finished, I carefully threaded the wires through the base, pinned and glued the lamppost and Carl in place, and could finally call this project complete!

Thanks for reading,

Terry