This is a great model to make if you are creating a beach scene. This is a bit of a fiddly model to make so don’t drink lots of coffee first. Steady hands are your friend.

1.Start by making the base of your sandcastle. The bigger your base the more towers you can fit on it so it is up to you how epic you want your castle to be. I stuck with just a couple of towers but there is no reason why you couldn’t build King Arthur’s dream palace!

2.Create your first tower by rolling quite a fat little sausage. Put it vertically on to your base and attach it with a bit of extra clay or just by pushing the end of the tower into the base with your fingers.

3.Roll a smaller sausage. This should be as thick as you want your turrets to be. I made the mistake of making this sausage too small the first time I made the turrets which meant I had to chop off the top of the tower and start over. If you aren’t sure about the size of your turrets, make a test tower that isn’t attached to your base. This is also useful to have if you want to practice making windows and doors for your castle. Once you have your smaller sausage that is the right thickness for your turrets, wrap it around the top of your tower. Blend it to the tower with your fingers.

4.Now you need to mark out your turrets. Check that you can remove every other turret without leaving a huge gap or two turrets together. Once you are ready you can remove every other turret which should leave you with a real castle like tower.

5.Next step is adding any doors and windows. All you need here is a pen. For the windows you just need to stick the pen tip into the clay and drag down very slightly. Any doors can be done the same way although you will need to scrape away any excess clay.

6.No sandcastle is complete without any flags. Wire is the best way of making the flag poles. Simply cut a small length of wire ready for your flag. Make a small triangle of clay and attach it to the wire. Then just place your flag on top of a tower, just like you would with a real sandcastle.

Your sandcastle is now ready to sit majestically on the beach.

Plants are a good staple model to put in any level. They can be dotted almost anywhere and add a bit of variety to a scene.

1. Start with a good old clay sausage. Make it the length of your desired plant. Taper the end by rolling it a bit more than the rest of your sausage. Repeat the process with smaller sausages of clay to make your branches.

2. Flatten out another chunk of clay to cut your leaves out of. This isn’t the only way to make leaves but I find it is the easiest way to make three pronged leaves . Cut your leaf shape into the clay, making sure you cut all the way through.

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My trip to GDC earlier this year was accompanied by some personal ‘firsts’ – my first visit to the States, my first time attending a major game developers’ gathering and the first time that I met fellow indie game developer John Graham of Wolfire Games.

After returning from GDC, John and I kept in contact and after hinting that he would love it if I could make a clay model of one of his characters I agreed that I would give it a go.
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It has been a very long time since I did any serious clay work for Cletus Clay. Finally, after a couple of months of working on other areas I’m back to making strange little creations out of clay. Now that most of the main models have been created my attention has been turned to sprucing up (embellishing) the levels. I love doing this sort of thing because when I play games at home, it is often the little details in a level that make me happy.

Most of the incidentals are only itty bitty, things like flowers and seashells so once I’ve got the design figured out I move on pretty quickly to creating the basic structure of the model. Here are the steps to creating a sunflower; I’ve put a completed sunflower beside the one I was working on so you can see the finished result:

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Boss of Clay

Last week we saw how Cletus Clay himself is constructed using clay. This week Anthony shows us how he creates his spaceships using some simple yet effective techniques and of course, yet more clay.

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