May of the Dead Mummy

Wooo! Today is my day! Welcome May of the Dead carnivalers and other table top terrain enthusiasts. My undead contribution will be Egyptian themed. Because if anyone knows how to treat their dead, it was the Egyptians. Basically the idea was to have a mummy busting out of his sarcophagus.






To start I found myself a dead Egyptian from Reaper miniatures, and crinkled up some aluminium foil large enough to realistically fit his body if he wasn't so gun-ho. The foil is just going to act as a place holder for the cavity of the sarcophagus.

Now for the casket itself, I pressed some Sculpey oven bake clay evenly around the foil.

Added a dog head to it for a more Anubis-y feel.

For the head dress, I rolled out a piece of clay cut it to shape and added the lines before adding it to the main box.

A pair of arms were added with decorative sticks, then I shaped in the details of the face & some hieroglyphs down the body.

Once I had everything satisfactory, I baked the sarcophagus in my toaster oven according to the Sculpey directions. Then taking a sharp paring knife, cut the clay in half all the way around deep enough to hit the tin foil. It took a couple passes, but the clay released easy enough.

I took my mummy & chopped off the box he was standing on so he would fit better.

Next, it's time to paint my dude & his fancy box. I wasn't too worried about the right arm & leg because they would end up hidden by the cover anyways.

For the floor, I took a piece of foam core, removed the paper cladding, and drew on some more hieroglyphs with a ball point pen. 

 After painting the floor, I attached the bottom half of the sarcophagus. Also, no respectable Egyptian gets buried without their riches, right? So using this handy trick I learned at TerraGenesis, I laid the foundation for some gold piles using hot glue.

After brushing on some PVA glue, I dumped on gold glitter to cover it. Ideally the glitter would be perfectly round & not the hexagons I have, but whatevs. No one is going to look that close.

Using that same idea, I took some more hot glue and added lines for a mass of scarabs escaping for the sarcophagus as well. 

My buddy Neil has some awesome examples of using grains of rice as maggots, so I thought I'd check out using split peas or lentils as scarabs. Unfortunately they were both far too large. Fortunately, I had some plastic beads that were easy enough to crack in half that were a good size.

I attached the bead bugs to the trails of hot glue & painted them.

Then it was just a matter of getting my dude glued in & the cover glued on top of him. I added a couple more bugs by his foot for good measure.

There you have it folks. Here's some final pictures for your viewing pleasure.

Thanks everyone for following along! If you have any questions, feel free to ask. Also, check out the rest of the May of the Dead participants. They've been gathering all month long for your one-stop-resource for all sorts of undead articles for gamers.