Building The Gorrath: When You Finally Have Time to Do It Right
As featured in Make: Magazine, June 2021
There are creatures in cinema that don’t just appear on screen — they occupy it.
I’ve spent a long time around the kind of people who make those creatures. I’ve worked alongside them, been shaped by that world, and eventually stepped away from it. And somewhere in all of that, an image stayed with me — a vast, ancient, reptilian predator. The kind of thing that feels like it existed long before the story it appeared in, and will exist long after.
That image became The Gorrath.
The Thing About Production Work
I spent nearly two decades working as a production artist in film. Troy. Beauty and the Beast. Blade Runner 2049. Pinewood, Shepperton, Origo Studios in Budapest. I worked my craft in that world — but it was never quite the thing I’d imagined, when I first fell in love with sculpture. Artworking is still much of a love of mine too, but another time.
Starting out as an assistant, you’re at the bottom of a hierarchy that can be, to put it diplomatically, ego-heavy. The film industry attracts strong personalities, and not all of them are generous with the people below them. You learn fast, you keep your head down, and you do the work — but it’s somebody else’s vision, somebody else’s deadline, and there’s rarely a moment to breathe, let alone to think. The clock is always running. There’s no time to sit with a piece, to look at it from across the room for an hour, to take it apart and start a section again because something feels slightly wrong.
I was good at it. But I never loved it the way I loved the idea of sculpture as a slower, more considered act — something made entirely on your own terms.
When I finally stepped away from productions and had time that was genuinely my own, this is what I wanted to do with it. Not for a director, not on a schedule, not alongside anyone else’s ego. Just the work itself, taken at whatever pace the work demanded.
The Gorrath was one of the first pieces I gave that kind of time to.
The Reference Problem
Before a single piece of clay goes down, you research. You gather every image, every angle, every fragment of reference you can find.
For a creature of this type — a massive, armoured, reptilian predator — detailed reference for the kind of physical presence I was after is surprisingly scarce. I worked from screen captures, fan-made virtual models, physical miniatures, and whatever I could freeze at the right moment. Twenty different angles, roughly, cross-referenced constantly throughout the build.
That process forced a creative decision early on: this would be an interpretation. An original creature, informed by the dark fantasy tradition but not beholden to any single source. I wasn’t trying to replicate anything. I was after something that felt ancient, dangerous, and entirely its own.
That turned out to be one of the more liberating parts of the whole project.
The Foundation
A sculpture at this scale doesn’t begin with clay. It begins with structure.
I built a foam foundation — a base form to carry the weight of the clay — and rigged it so I could work the piece at a near-vertical angle. Working vertically matters enormously on a build like this. It lets you read the form honestly as you go, see how light falls across the planes, catch problems while they’re still fixable. A piece lying flat on a table lies to you. Stood upright, it tells you the truth.
Over the foam, I applied water-based clay — built up in stages, worked slowly. By the time the sculpt was finished, I’d used approximately twenty-five kilograms of it. I’d started with thirty.
This is exactly the kind of thing that’s impossible on a production. You can’t spend weeks feeling your way into a piece when there’s a shoot date on the calendar. Here, the only deadline was the work itself.
The Sculpt
I worked the piece as a deep relief — fully sculpted on one side, flat on the other. All the drama of a three-dimensional form, presented as though the creature is emerging from the wall.
Blocking out came first: the broad masses of the skull, the jaw structure, the brow. Getting the proportions right before committing to any surface detail. Then the main forms were refined — the eye socket, the architecture of the jaw, the weight of the brow ridge.
The scales took a long time. I sculpted them deeper than my reference suggested, deliberately — I wanted an armoured quality, a sense that this creature’s hide had been built up over centuries of survival. Then the fine skin texturing pass, working over every scale with a small brush, blending the surface lines so everything flowed. In production, that pass would have been cut. Here, I could give it the time it needed.
Throughout all of this I was after something specific in the finished surface — not rushed, but not overworked either. There’s a quality that sculpture loses when you push it too far: it starts to look laboured, buffed, airless. I wanted The Gorrath to look sculptural. To carry the hand in it. Not a highly polished gem, but something with genuine weight and presence — the kind of surface that rewards looking at rather than just glancing past.
I’m my own harshest critic. I’m satisfied with this piece — but I could always find something to improve. That’s not dissatisfaction; that’s just how a serious sculptor thinks. You finish a piece when it’s ready, not when it’s perfect. And then you put that critical eye to work on the next one.
One discipline held throughout: at the end of every session, the sculpt was sprayed with water and sealed under a bin liner. Water-based clay dries unevenly if left exposed — some areas go first, others stay wet, and the tension between them cracks the surface. After weeks of detailed work, a crack at the wrong moment is a genuine setback. Moisture management isn’t glamorous, but it’s what separates a finished piece from a fractured one.
The Teeth
The Gorrath is, above all, a predator. And predators are defined by their teeth.
I designed the teeth from my own reference and instinct — what felt right for a creature of this scale and age. For the material I used synthetic oven-bake modelling compound: precise, workable, and far more practical than dental supplies for a build like this. Each tooth was shaped individually, baked hard, then superglued one by one into gum-holes prepared in the clay.
There are a lot of teeth on The Gorrath. It took a while.
Moulding
With the sculpt complete, the next stage was capturing it in platinum silicone — top-grade material, precise and durable.
The design required two separate moulds: one for the main head, one for the tongue. A single mould would have trapped the cast inside the mouth cavity. The two-piece approach was the only clean solution.
I apply silicone in layers, always starting with a thin unthickened detail coat — a runny first layer that flows into every recess and locks in the surface before anything thicker goes over it. Then thixotropic layers by brush, built up to the right thickness. For a skin mould of this type, around half a centimetre is sufficient.
Small silicone registration cubes locked the skin mould into the fibreglass outer jacket, keeping everything in alignment during casting. The fibreglass jacket itself was laminated to two layers — enough rigidity to prevent warping, enough resilience to survive the occasional drop.
Casting
The cast was built up from thickened epoxy resin — filler powder brought to a thixotropic state so it could be applied horizontally onto the mould without running. Two coats for the shell, then light glass mat for reinforcement, left overnight to cure.
Resin is sensitive to temperature. On cold days you increase the catalyst ratio or keep a heater nearby. The second option works. It also runs up the electricity bill.
Once cured, the shell was backed with expanding foam — supporting every area of the surface and reducing the final weight considerably. Any small imperfections were filled with P38 car body filler and sanded back. Then it was ready for paint.
The Paint Job
With almost no definitive colour reference to work from, the palette for The Gorrath was largely my own decision — reasoned out from the creature’s logic. What would make sense for something this size, this ancient?
Black acrylic base coat first — the right foundation for the silvery blue-green tones that dominate the head. Silver sprayed over the black, then thin blue and green acrylics airbrushed across the scales to build a fish-scale iridescence: cold, slippery, suggesting something that moves through darkness as easily as air.
Yellow was worked into the underside of the head and used to frame the eye, teeth, and nose — warmer tones pulling against the cold blues of the main surface. The mouth interior was airbrushed in three tones of reddish and orangey pinks. The teeth were airbrushed white, then glazed with brown and yellow to give them age and density — old ivory rather than clean bone.
Selected scales were given a gloss finish for contrast. The teeth and eyes were sealed.
Then the eyes: a thin pour of epoxy resin over the painted surface. I use this on all creature work. Resin adds a depth to a painted eye that no surface finish alone can replicate. It makes them look wet. It makes them look alive.
Why This Work Matters to Me
The Gorrath took 10 days, including tracking down references. On a production, that may never have been possible—and honestly, it shouldn’t be. Productions have their own rhythms and their own demands, and I respected that world for a long time.
But this kind of work — slow, considered, taken at the pace the piece itself requires — is what I always wanted to come back to. The film industry taught me crafts across a number of creative departments. Working for myself and on my own, taught me what I actually loved.
I’m building a body of work now that I intend to sell primarily as art. These pieces are not mass-produced, and they are not meant to look like they are. The original silicone mould for The Gorrath survives, which means further casts are possible — but each one is hand-finished and painted individually. No two will be identical.
What they will share is a quality I care about deeply: not rushed, not overworked. Sculptural. Something that carries the maker’s hand and holds its presence in a room. Not a trophy piece designed to impress at a glance—something you keep looking at.
If that’s the kind of work you want on your wall, made by someone who spent many years learning and experiencing several crafts, including practical works on real productions, and then finally had the time to do it properly—then this is what that looks like.
And for what it’s worth, I’m still learning. I hope I always will be.
The Gorrath is available as a hand-cast and painted piece. View it in the shop →
As featured in Make: Magazine, June 2021. Read the original article →
Robert Stannage is a Hollywood production artist with nearly twenty years across film and television, including Blade Runner 2049, Troy, and Beauty and the Beast.
