Making the Life-sized Artillery Witch

by Jamie McCann

Does your home need something special? Something to really impress your friends and family? Something that can provide you with an almost unending supply of demonic ordnance? Something that tests the very limits of your ceiling height? Well then why not build yourself an 11.5ft statue of the utterly iconic Artillery Witch?! (Your landlord/spouse/parents may come to a different conclusion.)

I’m Jamie McCann, the Creative Lead at Galactic Armory LLC. We are the official cosplay partners of Trench Crusade, providing the faithful and heretical amongst you with high-quality 3D printable costume files! One other thing we are well known for is our massive, scarily accurate life-sized statues. Whether it be huge 8ft tall alien warriors or gangly monster men, we thought we were well prepared for any challenge! Well, the team over at Factory Fortress decided to test our confidence by commissioning us to make them a life-sized statue of what can only be described as their fan-favourite design: the Artillery Witch.

“What makes the Artillery Witch so difficult?” you may ask. It’s just a lady with a fancy dress and a big ol’ bomb, right? Well, this dapper woman is nearly seven feet tall, is floating half a foot off the ground, and is summoning what can only be described as aircraft-grade ordnance suspended above her head! All of that combined results in a whopping 11.5ft tall statue, which also needs to be able to be taken apart for transport, because it will be displayed at the Trench Crusade booths all across to the US! Easy, right? (Wrong.)

Over-engineering

As with all great Galactic Armory projects, it starts with a 3D model designed from the ground up. This model is optimised for printing at such a large scale, is designed with access ports in the back, and features handy pegs for aligning all of the parts together. But for a statue of this height, there is one diabolical force that is more threatening than all the combined forces of all of the Arch-Devils: physics. Suspending such a large item, off-centre, extremely high up, and over a relatively skinny armature creates a lot of torque on the statue, and as such, this project requires some over-engineering! So we looked to our very own Gari Jiménez-Lugo, an experienced metalworker, to design an internal aluminium support and crossbar system to provide some very serious structure to this artificial weapon of war!

But didn’t we say over-engineered? That’s right! We went one step further to add some serious strength to the entire structure, using a marine-grade expanding foam throughout the hollow internal print. This stuff packs some serious toughness, being both shockingly light and extremely rigid. Combined with the metal skeleton, we turned what would typically be a pretty fragile structure into something that could tank a shot from a Sultanate Grand Cannon!

Haute couture

Now that we had the challenge of her proportions under control, we could focus on potentially the most important element of this project: the aesthetics. Whilst making her incredibly ornamental armour look suitably ostentatious was right in our wheelhouse, we decided that we needed to go one step further on a build like this. Mike Franchina’s original artwork caught all of our imagination because of the beautiful dress and flowing cape – and nothing but a real, tailored dress would be good enough! So we brought in our good friend Katie Miller Costume to sew up an entirely custom dress for this statue, including over 80 silver buttons, an 8 foot long cape, and a ruff that can only be described as the width of a serving tray! You just have to admit, we made the right choice in using a real dress.

The bomb

Structure? Check. Armour? Check. Dress? Check. That left one particularly volatile matter to contend with, and that could only be the huge bomb summoned straight from the armouries of Hell! First things first: we needed to reduce the weight of the bomb as much as possible, and that’s where our friends over at Prop House Productions came in! Using a five-axis CNC cutter to carve out the bomb in high-density foam, we could ensure that we got the best of both worlds – strong and lightweight! Once it was suitably diabolic in appearance, it was ready to mount! Using a thick, transparent acrylic rod, we could get some semblance of having the bomb “levitate” above her outstretched hand.

Standing tall

With this, and a suitably “trenchy” base, she could be fully assembled! And WOW, she is tall! Standing at 11.5 feet, she nearly maxes out our studio space, and she has to be brought outside into the carpark just to get proper photos of her in all of her insidious glory! Now, all that was left was packing her into a custom storage box and driving her the 900 miles from New Jersey to Adepticon, in Milwaukee.

This build was a challenge from concept to completion, but it was all oh so worth it when we saw the excitement from the Trench Crusade team on the con floor! And we totally had to stick around just to see the public’s reaction to such an iconic symbol of the Trench Crusade universe being brought to life!

Thank you to the team at Factory Fortress for trusting us with such an epic commission! We hope that you get to see the Artillery Witch at a convention near you soon! Keep an eye on Galactic Armory’s social media accounts for future Trench Crusade releases!

Jamie McCann

Jamie is the co-host of the Galactic Armory Youtube channel, where he heads up their industrial-scale prop shop. A Northern Irishman stuck in New Jersey, he survives on a healthy diet of plastic dust and energy drinks. As a wargamer for over 25 years, he enjoys taking painting concepts usually reserved for miniatures and upscaling them to life-sized costumes and statues. Jamie takes great joy in grossing out his colleagues with his particularly wretched Black Grail warband.