OK, here’s a slightly better photo.

Click on the image for a more detailed version.

The one on the far left is the original beholder I made. I really only made it because someone had expressed an interest in having one, and I spent maybe 30 minutes on it.

Then the whole molding and casting resin bug bit me, and I decided to do a more “serious” version of it. The all-white one in the foreground is the result of that effort. It was maybe 30 minutes of sculpting that I did while watching “Top Shot” last week. I used aluminum foil as the basic shape and then used sculpey clay to do the “detail” work. Then I baked it to harden it.

Then I had to build a mold, and mold building is no picnic. Still, I got one done, and from that I have cast four resin versions of the original. One of them, still unpainted, is the clear looking one in the front.

Then I painted it. First I painted it without the eyestalks and thought it came out really nice. But adding the eyestalks (on the one in the middle, back) mostly hid a lot of really cool details, so I decided to do it again with the thinnest eyestalks I could. So the one on the right, back, I drilled holes into the resin and glued in some aluminum wire for the eyestalks, and then painted them. It’s still not perfect, and this photo still doesn’t do it complete justice, but it’s a better photo than the other one.