Last Goblin fanboy

My 4 Orc Blitzers are each carry a goblin in a barrel on their backs.
I had sorted the barrels and put together 3 of the goblin fanboys ( as I have taken to call them). One with a catapult, one with a blunderbuss and one with a grabber.

The idea I had for the last fanboy goblin was for the goblin to have his arms up looking like he is about to catch a ball. The idea being the Orc and Goblin working together, the Blitzer facing forward running towards the endzone with the goblin on his back catching a ball for him. The kind of cheating you would expect from an Orc team.

I looked through the kits I had and found a goblin that was almost right for the job.
At this point I would like to apologise for the lack of photos of the original miniature. I forgot to take a photo of it before I started working on it. However I do have a photo of a picture from the Stormboyz set that show the goblin in question.

I wanted to use this model because it was standing up straight and had an arm up already .
The first thing I did was cut the left arm and re-glue pointing upwards. I then decide to cut away the hand holding the bomb-stik. Looking back, I can't actually remember why I thought that would be a good idea...

Below is what I ended up with.

Leaving the missing hand for a moment, the pose was okay. I would have liked the arms to be closer together, in a just about to catch pose, so that the goblin could actually hold the ball during the game if that Blitzer had it. But it still looked like the Goblin was "calling" for the ball, which seemed fine. I did briefly play with the idea of trying to re-position the arms by either physically bending them or cutting at the elbow and using greenstuff to put together again. But at this point I wasn't willing to try and remodel the arms, or make anymore drastic cuts.

And now for the bouncing squig in the room..the missing hand....yeah......

I think that I wanted both hands to be open and the right hand was in a fist. So I removed it with out really think about what I would do once it was removed.
I didn't have another open right hand I could use from another model. The two options I could think of were:
1) Use putty to make a mold of the left hand, then reverse it to make a mirror right.
2) Try and model a right open hand out of putty.

Neither option filled me with confidence. option 1 seemed much more do-able then option 2 though.
So the plan was to make a mirror of the left hand by making a mold. But before I attempted that I decided to try and "sculpt" a hand. I expected it to be rubbish, but I thought the practice would be good.

Yep it was laughably bad.

But from failure can come inspiration, and so it was for my hand less goblin. Looking at my horribly mis-proportioned, mis-shaped attempt, I saw an idea. Foam Hands!

That, I felt I could do, and it would fit perfectly with the idea of them being fanboyz goblins.

I decided to give the goblin two foam hands, rather then keep the hand that was okay and make the foam hand for the hand that was missing, I went and built on top of the existing hand.

It should be noted that when I get a little excited about an idea I tend to stop making sensible decisions. In hindsight making the foam hand for the missing hand first would have made more sense. I started with the shape being very flat, and planned to add layers of putty to give it some depth.

Overall I am really quite pleased with the idea. The execution needs improving but I am happy with the above model. I need to gain a bit of patience, control and concept of proportion in my modelling ability.
Now I know some of you will have had the same thought I did...why not "middle finger" the foam hands. And yes that would have looked funny, and yes it would have been in keeping with the mentality of an Orc team with Goblin fans. But I decided to keep the team family friendly. I am more comfortably with them that way. I want to be able to play with them anywhere with out worrying about age appropriateness.

Foam Goblin in his barrel.