Kornil's Staff

So. I sent my long time buddy a BJD as a thank you gift for doing some truly wonderful clothing for my crew. It was intended to serve as a handy base for if she wanted to expand her doll crafting business into BJD-sized clothes. What was not intended was for her to fall down the BJD rabbit hole with me. But then she ordered a SatoriaJ Dominic, and the planning and worldbuilding began.

And because he was to be a mage-a ripped mage, from a bunch of elf vikings who are not afraid to whallop you in melee combat. Which means that like all mages, he needed a staff.

A big, dragon-themed, skullcracker of a staff. Enter the box cutter.

I cut down a dowel rod and sawed the head and foot off an old toy dragon. After some dremeling and threading on jewelry rings, I stuck on the parts with bits of paperclip and hot glue, and had something staff-shaped. Then I attacked it again with the dremel to give it some battle damage texture. But the staff still felt like it needed something. And then I was reminded of a phrase I'd heard: 'hot glue is the poor man's 3D printer.'

I got out the mini hot glue gun and proceeded to attack the staff with it, going for sort of a melted metal work effect.

Once that was cooled, it was time to coat it with gesso, so it looked less like a haphazard experiment and more like an actual staff someone designed.

After about two days to make sure the gesso was really good and dry and shrunk down, a coat of glossy black:

Followed by drybrushing on varying mixes of silver airbrush paint and grey miniature acrylic paint onto the parts that were supposed to look like metal. The wood was left black, as I wanted to keep to a black/purple/silver color scheme.

I felt like while paint improved the staff, it still needed more decoration. So I cut purple leather strips she'd sent me previously and turned them into grips on the main body of the staff-I wanted to look like it had grips for both normal holding and for holding it so you could really whack somebody with it. Then I strung bits and bobs (drilled crystals, bone beads, acrylic beads) onto beading string, and used a combination of the leather and tacky glue to help keep them in place.

Yes, the backdrop for this is terrible but the only other large piece of foamboard I had was black with glitter, which would have swallowed any details.) Also, click the this and the following to get proper pics for all the detail.

The bead acting as an jewel in the dragon's mouth also got two layers of tacky glue to hold it in place, because it had a few near-escapes. Considering that nothing came loose during its journey (and the hot glue didn't melt), I'd say the paint and the tacky glue did its job on this project.

The last bit to add on the staff was the orb to serve as a base, because the dragon foot is kind of lopsided and not good for resting on the ground. So I rolled up a blob of Model Magic, squished it into place to get the indents so it would sit flush, and then let it dry. After that I tacky glued it in place and hit it with two layers of the Citadel purple contrast paint, which got a nice sort of variation in the shades of purple across it. Then it I put on two coats of the Dragonfly glaze, because 1. sparkly and 2. I know if you go thick enough it'll dry with a white cloudy cast, and I wanted to get more variation on the orb. I'm really pleased with how it turned out.

If you're gazing into this thing, your future is a fractured skull.

Finally, to give an idea of the sheer size of this thing, here's Skelf holding it. It's big, solid, and required a poster mailing tube for it to ship out. An absolute pain to send out, but I had fun making it.

Another one to click to properly see. Big staff and big doll are big.