We love Half-Life. We love Portal. We love Portal 2. Valve Corporation wedding cake toppers were inevitable.
Portal gun and crowbar together at last
Again, high excitability = no process shots. Please forgive my shame.
The cake is a truth
The cube and figures are polymer clay over a tightly packed foil base. My hands are strong now. Like, Rockbiter strong. Mmm, delicious limestone.
Anyhoo.
I baked the Companion Cube first so the figures had something sturdy to sit on. Yes, this means they have Companion Cube grooves molded into their cabooses. No, that is not a problem.
Groom Gordon’s crowbar took damage. This is expected.
I didn’t print out my Companion Cube reference and thus missed the center lines on each side before baking. Fortunately a little Sharpie fixes that right up.
For each figure, I worked from the feet up. I sculpted up to the waist, and then I baked that. Then I sculpted the waist to the shoulders and baked that. This worked great for preserving the stability and sculpt of the figure overall, but it did mean the Bride Chell feet got a little toasty by the end.
Hobbit feet up in this piece
I justify this by saying Chell’s feet would probably get grubby running around those experiments, Long Fall Boots or no.
I finished the faces last which really gave me a chance to concentrate on them.
Unity!
The characters were originally designed to hold hands and look back at the viewer, but only if they’re sitting on a certain face of the Companion Cube and if you mess with them just right.
On the day of the wedding, due to venue snafuage, it was up to two kind and loving friends — my Original Heckling Partner and her sister — to choose how the figures should sit. And I like what they did much better. It seems more sweet and tender and fun to have the figures reaching out for each other. (And it’s probably a major reason they didn’t get knocked over.)
Stability is key
Today the figures are sitting behind glass, so the cat can’t get to them. In this way, follow-through is very important.
