The Steampunk Jabberwock...
Back in 2016 we took part in a big sculpture project to be displayed in the grounds of Rydal Hall in Ambleside, on the theme of the Alice in Wonderland books. I (Ben) ended up making a sculpture of a self-propelled crane which became the Jabberwock monster- there's more back in the June 2016 part of the blog.
Sufficed to say it got built, a caterpillar-tracked monster monstrosity which was to a design which I'd arrived at via lots of experimentation, and which I was... vaguely satisfied with. The original plan had been to have a narrow-gauge railway-mounted crane, but various limitations stopped me from doing that design.
Anyway; roll on to 2019, and an open-call for an art gallery gave me the opportunity to revisit the idea, and at least this time I wouldn't be restricted by having to make a 3/4 sculpture, but could make it as a model.
The prototype for this new version of the design was a vertical-boiler steam crane (ableit standard gauge) in a museum in Scotland; self-propelled steam cranes would be... unlikely, shall we say, in narrow gauges, but hey-ho, this is Steampunk. The genre rarely makes sense. I wanted a bit more of an atmosphere that this was a regular crane, slightly run-down and derelict, which looked sufficiently monster-like from certain angles.
I'll leave most of the detailed, nerdy step-by-step making-of for an eventual post on the Model Making blog, but I thought a couple of shots pre-painted would show the basics of construction. The best thing is it actually runs, sitting on a radio-controlled Playmobil motor block.
By this point I'd actually come up with a more suitable idea for the open call, but was able to interest the editor of a model railway mag in the project, for an article later in the year. I needed to get some decent photographs to show him exactly what mad thing I'd made though...
The original intention had been to shoot some spooky pics out in the woods at Saltaire, but then the model got so big that lumping it and a load of track half a mile from the car to a random clearing would have been impractical. Luckily the in-laws have a bit at the end of their garden which was suitable for some shots.
So there is the model- I properly enjoyed making this, and taking more time over it than the concept ones I built so quickly for the original project.
I need to do some more shots of this model, to make it look spookier for the magazine article, so another post will follow later in the year, but overall this was a very enjoyable and stress-relieving build.
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