Paolo Rivera is perhaps best known as the Eisner Award-winning artist of Daredevil, Mythos and The Amazing Spider-Man, but before he began working for Marvel almost a decade ago, he sculpted a Mystique bust for Dynamic Forces. He followed that with another commission from the company in the form of a Red Sonja statue that he thought would amount to "a few weeks of sculpting." However, as he explains in a new blog post, the project became a little more involved.

"As you can probably guess, a few weeks turned into 2 full months of intense noodling," he wrote. "Aside from the challenge of being my first full figure, the mass production process required it to be divided into several pieces — what ended up being 6 in all. I let the professionals do the casting and painting this time, as I had learned my lesson with Mystique."

Rivera, whose process posts are always informative and entertaining, goes into quite a bit of detail on his blog, and even provides a work-in-progress slideshow (below).