Happy B-day Eric!

For Eric's 24th, I made him a Horadic Cube plus all 33 runes from Diablo 2. I also tossed in a couple of gems and a bonus rune (and he also got a copy of The Moose with Loose Poops and homemade cinnamon buns instead of cake which I should have taken pics for the food part of this blog but I didn't.)

These first 2 shots show the images from the game along with the objects I made:

True nerds will pick up on the bonus rune right quick.

The cube is, of course, a box to keep the runes in:

Gratuitous close up:


Since this blog layout doesn't really allow for big pics, click on them for the decent size.

I made this in secret, carting paint, polymer clay, and gold leaf back and forth from work, working on it sporadically over the course of about a month, trying desperately not to get caught by the bosses (I got caught plenty, but luckily my co-workers aren't douchbags). We have a small toaster oven at work where I was able to cure the clay on the runes, but I had to wake up extra early on weekends to do the box itself and the decorative inlays to have them cooled and stowed by the time Eric got out of bed.

I also had to teach myself how to make a mold as I was remiss to attempt to make 5 design panels individually. Instead I only had to do it once, but in making the mold and then the panels, I ruined 3 of them before figuring out corn starch does shit-all for a release agent whereas plain old water worked great.

Part of the learning process led me to believe that there was no bloody way I was going to be able to make a cube by pre-baking panels and adhering them together, so I opted to cover a balsa wood pencil box I had laying around - this box was 10 years old and covered with dust and leaked ink and everything else you might imagine. I got the clay to stick by using liquid clay all over it, and then laying out rolled sheets of copper with black and red swirls, and then baking it. The lid (and the lip underneath that I didn't got a shot of) is just clay.