Sculpting a Cave Troll in a Cold Spanish Garage
The Trophy That Started Everything
Some ideas arrive fully formed. The Cave Troll trophy was one of them.
Not just a creature head. Not just a sculpture. A story — a medieval knight, a battle in the dark, a trophy claimed and mounted. The kind of object that makes someone stop in a doorway and ask, “What on earth is that?”
That was the concept from the start. And the setting in which it came to life was — to put it mildly, atmospheric.
The Garage in Spain
The studio for this build was an unheated concrete shell in the Spanish mountains. No insulation. No warmth. Just four bare walls, a floor, and iron bars where the windows should have been. Winter light coming through in cold, flat rectangles.
It was, in its way, the perfect place to sculpt a cave-dwelling creature.
I have worked in some challenging environments over nearly twenty years in the film industry—cold warehouses, outdoor locations, and cramped sets. You learn to work with what you have. The cold becomes background. The work becomes the foreground.
Thirty kilograms of potter’s clay. A metal and wood armature to support it. And an Cave Troll of Moria inspired creature, waiting to be pulled out of the material.
Five Days of Clay
The clay build took five days from start to finish.
That pace is deliberate—clay dries, cracks, and loses detail if you leave it too long. You block out the mass first, finding the broad form before committing to anything. Then the bones and muscle structure underneath the skin. Then the details—nostrils, eyelids, teeth. Finally, the skin texture itself, the elephant-like quality I wanted for a large, lumbering creature that lives underground.
I changed the skull from the film’s smoother forehead to something more ribbed—a small departure from the reference, but one that felt right for the character. Twenty years of working on sculptures in my own time away from the studios, art directors, and production designers teaches you to go at your own pace: always an artistic judgment serves the piece better.
By day five the sculpt was done. More than enough time. I sealed it, let it firm slightly, and turned to the problem that would define the next stage of the build.
The Silicone Problem
Silicone cures through a chemical reaction. That reaction is temperature-dependent. In a cold, unheated concrete garage in a Spanish winter, the silicone was refusing to cure at anything approaching a useful rate.
The solution—more catalyst. Significantly more than standard ratios. Enough to force the reaction as well as holding a portable bathroom radiator hovering around the form to keep it in operation
It is the kind of problem-solving that comes from experience rather than instruction manuals. I had faced similar challenges before—working on The Da Vinci Code in a freezing warehouse at Bray Studios during a snowy winter, pushing resin catalyst ratios to get the material to behave in impossible conditions. The principle is the same: understand your material well enough to push it beyond its comfort zone without losing control of it.
The silicone went on in layers—a liquid detail coat first, pressed into every crevice of the skin texture, then thixotropic layers built up until the skin mold was thick enough to support the casting process. A fiberglass jacket backed the whole thing.
The mold held. The detail was there.
The Hunter’s Trophy Concept
The trophy board was planned from the beginning — it was always part of the concept, not an afterthought.
The idea was simple: a knight, victorious in battle against the creature of Moria, claims his trophy the way hunters have always claimed theirs. The face, mounted on a board. A record of the encounter.
I fabricated the board from a polystyrene sheet—cheap, light, and easy to carve—shaped into the form of a coat of arms shield, the kind of backing you might find in a castle hall or a hunting lodge. The finish was bronze-effect, built up in layers of translucent glazes, greens, and blue-greens over black to suggest the weight and patination of ancient metal.
The result, when the troll face was mounted on the board, was exactly what I had imagined. Something dramatic. Something that tells a story without needing a caption.
The Painting
The cast came out of the mold clean, backed with lightweight foam to keep the weight manageable.
Painting began with layered flesh tones—grey as the base, the colour of something that has never seen sunlight. Dark spots suggesting unhealthy skin. The decay of cave-dwelling. I wanted the troll to look like a creature from a specific environment, not just a generic monster.
The teeth were painted with some suggestion of decay — not excessive, but present. The eyes were given epoxy resin coats to bring depth and a glazed, animal quality. Veins in the whites, painted with fine dry roots found in the landscape around the garage. I wanted the eyes to remain recognizably alive—wild, but not entirely inhuman.
The trophy board’s bronze finish was built last. Layers of translucent glaze, imagining the shield of the knight who had faced this creature in the dark and won.
The Finished Piece
The Cave Troll face trophy is a half-scale piece—dramatic enough to command a room without overwhelming it.
It is designed to be mounted on a wall. Above a fireplace is ideal. In a collector’s space, a study, a home cinema—anywhere that benefits from something genuinely unusual.
The full technical build process was documented in Make: Magazine. What I hope this account captures is the conditions, the concept, and the particular satisfaction of pulling something like this out of a cold concrete garage with iron bars for windows.
Limited pieces are available. Each one is hand-cast and painted by a working ex-Hollywood production artist with nearly twenty years of professional experience.
View and purchase the Cave Troll trophy in the Sculpture section.
Robert Stannage is a production artist with nearly twenty years of experience across major Hollywood studio productions, including Troy, Blade Runner 2049, Beauty and the Beast, and The Da Vinci Code. He is a published contributor to Make: Magazine.
