The Night of Lord Shiva

My latest is an awesome sculpt from SiJi @ manoGK that depicts Shiva (the supreme God of Hinduism) along with the goddess Shakti. The components of the kit feel very "shrine-like" and I wanted to make the piece seem a little more alive. So, I scratch-built the most complex base I think I've done and created a scene roughly based on the legend of The Night of Lord Shiva (the night Shiva weds Shakti). You may notice that the base was visually inspired from the very awesome movie The Life of Pi. To create the pool that contains the ruins of the shrine, I picked up a bunch of aquarium slate and hot-glued all the individual rocks together (using a picture frame and a plaque as the base) and painstakingly added a bunch of fine turf to simulate the mossy growth on the ancient scene. To light the scene at night, I created some lanterns; the lanterns were built from brass bead endcaps (used for making jewelry) and some plastruct pipe. Holes were drilled through the base to allow some small lights to go into the bottom side of the lanterns ... some care with the holes while pouring the resin gives them the appearance of floating on the water. I also created some "jewelry / clothing" for Shakti (she is wearing nothing but bandages in the sculpt). Her jewelry was created out of different sizes of brass chain, some more bead endcaps and some swarovski crystals. I added some freehand on the bandages that is my best attempt to re-create a 7th century Chinese poem about the night. The pool is clear resin tinted greenish-brown on top of the base which I painted blue-black so that the water would look dark and murky for this night time scene. Finally, Shakti was painted blue as it symbolizes divinity in many religions including Hinduism. As is always the case, the entire piece was hand-painted using acrylics.

I hope you enjoy the piece ... it is one of my favorites.

Please check out the expanded view to see the details.

If you'd like to see more pics, please visit my site: [link] or check out this collage on dA: [link]