Jaws for biting beetles with

That's one of the uses for them, anyway, according to the character's name. Starting to make a new face for the chewed up cyclops raptor. Also here are some edits I've already made elsewhere on the figure.

In addition to the trims I'd already made, to have the inside of the mouth match throughout the jaws, I carved out the old surfaces to make room for the new. Those teeth can stay, as they're close enough to the edges I'll just use them as part of the lips.

Then making those new parts with polymer clay. The figure's original palate had this "this way down the throat" arrow pattern, so I gave the new palate the same.

Teeth. Like with Serene and Singer's mouth parts, I didn't bake the teeth first. They're attached firmly by blending them a bit into the pink clay with a small tool (sewing pin), then covering up the blending by smoothing tiny flecks of pink clay on top of it, and applying a little bit of liquid polymer clay along the gumline for added strength before baking.

Making a gradient for the lower jaw's mouth part. The palate has it, too, but I had so little of the light pink that it's not very visible.

Measured, cut, and shaped, and ready for teeth. I kept the bits cut out from around it, both for those pink flecks and for making the tongue later.

And baked. I'm really happy with how this turned out. I think my tiny raptor teeth have improved with each raptormouth I've made.

I used that long strip of gradient-pink clay to make the tongue, with the colours reversed for contrast. Textured with the fingertips of a latex glove that has a bit of a "grip" texture, because I like how it looks on clay pieces that are supposed to be something organic. I used it on the leaves in Swiftdive and Treeclimber's bases, too (and on their tongues, of course).

A snout. The foil inside it is smushed against the snout stump on the figure to fit them together better. Like with Singer, the nostrils are made with the tip of a darning needle, and the texturing is done with the paperclip stamp.

This tiny little bean is a chin.

After this I did some more precise measuring, and back and forth trimming away and adding clay to the various head parts while trying them on the figure. One challenge with this figure was that I didn't have an unbroken figure of the same sculpt as reference, like I did with Dare for the tigerstripe bros. But I didn't set out to recreate the figure's original head anyway, just to make something in similar enough proportions so as to not look out of place with the rest of the figure. Another challenge was the action feature that causes the figure's head to move very easily from side to side, which means I had trouble holding the figure still and holding the parts in place for fittings at the same time. Unfortunately that means no fitting photos, as I would have needed a third hand for holding the camera, too.

Each photo in this little triptych is a separate bake. I attached the lower jaw's mouth part to the chin part with again a very thin sheet of unbaked clay with liquid clay on each side. Because there's so little of the lower jaw, I put a little support under the mouth part's other end while baking to keep it horizontal, so it wouldn't possibly slide out of place. Then I added a bit of clay to the chin to widen it a bit towards the mouth, and then added a little snake of clay for what I can make of the lower lip before attaching this part to the figure.

The palate got one pair of teeth cut off at the back, and that covered up with more pink clay, before cutting it to shape. Then I made as much of the upper lip as possible, too.

Like Singer's figure, this figure also has some uneven pieces that are hard to fit together, and because of that I didn't attach the palate to the snout piece until when attaching both to the figure. Making use of what I've learned from making Singer's figure, I then sculpted the lip onto the palate, as that's the piece the lip needs to align with. Beetlebiter has some complicated lip patterns, too, just on the upper lip, but at least his are symmetrical. I used white clay and a mix of black and blue clay.

After some more fitting, the upper lip still received an addition. The edge of the lip was pretty uneven and bumpy as a result of the different colours, and the lip also wasn't quite long enough, so I added some white clay to shape the lip. And also fixed one small tooth I broke while working on the lip (I have clay mixed into the tooth colour saved, so I just took a small piece of that and stuck it onto the tooth stump with some liquid clay). After baking that I painted the black markings onto the new lip addition with acrylics. I also painted a bit of a darker red onto the palate at the throat end.

After carving the inside of the figure's mouth more with a smaller knife to neaten things up (still a bit uneven, but it's hard to reach at good angles), I painted there, too, so there's nothing green in there when the head is put together.

Then on to attaching the new parts to the figure. First the snout and palate. The snout is attached with epoxy putty, and the palate is glued to the figure and at one spot to the snout in addition to having a bit of putty in the seam. They were tricky to get to stay in place at least until the glue dried because there's not much keeping them on there other than adhesives.

Then I attached the lower jaw, with a new batch of putty, and glue between the figure and the underside of the mouth piece. I also sealed more firmly the seam between the palate and snout now. I didn't want to poke at those pieces too much while they could still move around easily, but I started this pass three hours after the first one, so the glue had dried and the putty had mostly hardened.

So, now he at least has a snout and a chin again, but obviously there's still a long way to go.