New

With my creativity level low this month, I have been lurking around the Net finding some new subjects to spark my mood. 

My first offering is from CGS Military Figures out of the UK and it's the companion to my recent Doc Holiday bust. It's Wyatt Earp. The kit is 200mm and comes in 10 parts: body, head, 2 arms, gun w/ hands, 2 hats, 2 flintlocks, and a pedestal.  The likeness to Kurt Russell is not as good as the likeness of Doc was to Val Kilmer. But I guess with the low slung hat and the giant mustache, there's not a lot of room for facial recognition points.

Next is from my friend John Dennett at MoonDevil Studios. It's an aquatic monster John calls The Deep One. It's part of a series he has in relation to JP Lovecraft. This is a 6 part kit in a bubble free, nearly seam free resin. The parts fit together very nicely and only a minimum amount of putty will be needed to make the seams completely disappear.

The third one was a kit I was able to see in the making at the modeling/sculpting forum The Clubhouse. "Pat Morea" created The Rock show WIP on this forum as he went along. It looks to be 1/5 or more likely 1/4 full figure. The likeness is very good. but it looks like the mold slipped, and separated a bit below the waste. A bit of work will be needed to correct this.

My final offering for this installment is a kit from a miniatures Co., called Terrible Kids Stuff  (TKS). The kit is a 75mm (1:24) kit called The Birth of Dracula. The scene depicts Vlad holding the lifeless body of Elisabeta, with his free hand up to his face in grief. I found it a very powerful scene. 
The kit is a limited edition of 75 castings. On the site they guesstimated that it would be sold out in Aug., but when I ordered in October, and the kit came it had a certificate of authenticity numbered 70 of 75. So there is a small chance to get one. 
It comes in 7 parts - Vlad's head/body/legs, Elisabeta's head/body, Vlad's upraised arm, his cape, Elisabeta's 2 dangling arms and a block base. The base also has a "base" in that extra material was used to lift the block floor off the ground. Nice touch.  The model is exquisitely sculpted and cast; no bubbles and no apparent seam lines. The resin is the type you some time run across in Europe and SE Asia where there is a pretty strong petroleum smell, especially when one cuts or sands the resin. That aside, this is going to be a pleasure to build.

Thanks for looking.

Beetlejuice - Beetlejuice

Beetlejuice!
Certain cable channels runs movies in sort of marathons. I forget which channel it was, but they seemed to run Beetlejuice every other night all month. So what the heck, let me get my kit  of the "Bio-exorcist" out and start painting away. 

Beetlejuice came in just 3 parts of bubble free resin - the figure, the sand worm's fin and the sand worm/ gravestone base. But included is a resin Book for the Recently Deceased, and a Beetlejuice flyer. There's no real place to put these on the base so they are just extras - 

After doing a cleaning and double prime, I started out by finding an image of the man himself. everyone knows what Beetlejuice looks like until it comes time to paint him. So I found a pic I could use.  Keaton has a number of wardrobe changes, and the kit appears to come from the opeing scene where Beetlejuice first appears - 

So starting out I painted the face a very pale almost white color, but as the image shows and his neck is almost regular flesh color near the Hawaiian shirt. His hair and the "growth" on his face also gets a base coat of light green - 

His shirt and topcoat now get their base color as does the sand worm and gravestone - 

I was toying with the idea of gluing a magnet to the sand worm fin so that it wouldn't break off during transit etc... but thought it would be too much work for something that *might* happen. so I just glue it in and finished off the painting - 

Turning back to the figure and giving the example pic a good look, the circles around his eyes are on the purple side, but his eyebrows were left dark. Also I noticed that his hair is a lot lighter in the movie than the behind the scenes images, so I sort of split the difference - 

The next thing on the list is the design on the shirt. Looking at the example pic above there is some sort of design in black, but I couldn't make out what it is. Looking thru a LOT of images didn't help until I came across this one-  and saw they were those heraldic lions!

The lions are pointed in all different directions and some are even reversed, so thats what I tried to copy. All that was left was to gloss the eyes (Michael Keaton has blue eyes) and mouth, and I am calling this one done. Thanks for looking.

Mr. Hyde

I had Mr. Hyde on the shelf for a while now - as is most of my stash. It's been so long that I've forgotten which Co. produced it. (I'm going to have to start writing that down when I first get the kit). But it was sculpted by the one and only Yeagher.
The kit came in pink and white resin and had no bubbles and only a minimum of a seam line - 

In the movie Fredric March played Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde.  What wasn't obvious to those not really paying attention was that when Jekyll first turned he hardly looked different. But after subsequent changes, he became quite animalistic.  This model is definitely his look at the end of the movie. 

After my two tone primer I have it a base coat of Vallejo's Barbarian Flesh. The hat and coat is V's Black Gray. The band around the hat is Gloss black.

The hair and eyebrows were painted with V's Black Brown, and the shirt was base coated in Beige, and then a top coat of Ivory, highlighted with Off White. 
The face got a highlight dusting in V's Game Color Flesh going *very* lightly -

Looking it up it was said that Fredric March's eyes were brown, so that's what I used. 

The base was primed black and then base coated with a dark gray. It was then highlighted with a lighter gray. I added a little V's environment Slime Green. 
The bottle was a tiny bottle I had lying around. 
The label was done by going to MS Word and typing 3 lines of random letters in tiny Greek font and printing that out. I used Army painter soft Tone to "age" the paper, and then Strong Tone to darken the paper edges. 
I added some Yellow/Green to the bottle, rolled it around and then tipped it over recreating a spill. Once dry I added a little gloss and then added of few drops of the yellow/green onto the base floor. 
When this was all dry I glued the bottle with some MicroScale Kristal Klear, and called it done.
Thanks for looking. 

Leonov Space Walk

There was recently a question  on a forum about the hoses et.al. on Leonov's suit. Images are fairly hard to find but most aren't clear. New Ware did a First Spacewalkers model and has pretty clear instructions on the hoses and where they go -

A mini Wolfman

This time around I have a quick, easy to do little figure. 
I got this from a Kickstarter campaign that offered a number of small busts of the classic monsters.
In KS I chose the wolfman (can never have too many werewolves) and a Mr. Hyde. The wolfman looks to be a take off of the Oliver Reed wolfman.

After a wash, the wolfman got a once over looking for seams. Then he got a primer coat and then a base coat in a dark brown. 

The painting went so smoothly that I didn't think to stop and take pics along the way. So here's the finished mode. Thanks for looking.

Glencoe's Retriever Rocket

Rumors of my modeling demise have been greatly exaggerated.  LOL  I've still been building but with the latest Apple iPhone update, it's more difficult to upload images from my phone to the PC. So things have slowed down. But anyway...

Glencoe's Retriever Rocket has been around a while, and while I vaguely remember building it in my youth, I decided to try it again. 

So far the only problem I had, was that out of the box one of the rings had snapped - 

No worries, that should be easy to fix.
The next thing I noticed is that the large "flight deck" windows reveal ... nothing when you look in.  So I had two choices, to create a flight deck or to darken the windows so you can't see in.  I chose the former and started my search  for parts to fill the void. The model box says the kit is 1/72 so I got my casts of a 1/72 pilot and created a few more. My craft will have 3 in there. I also found 3 seats on Megahobby. Looking for 1/72 instruments to busy up the area, I came up empty, so I did the next best thing in getting PE instruments in 1/48.

Starting with the flight deck, once I got the windows in, I then got out my strip styrene to create a back wall, and a floor, and painted it gray. The window part is very thick, so I painted the edge black and then glued the instrument PE to the edge of the window - 

From there the rest of the build was easy - with the exemption of the port hole windows. There was no problem with them, but while cleaning the tab off one, it flew and was promptly swallowed by the carpet monster. 

Once it was all together, the entire interior was very hard to see. While you can see a pilots head in the window, I had the feeling the pilots are too big. I should have used HO (1/87) figures. I also should have painted the flight deck a lighter color so you could see in better. Oh well. 

With building essentially done, I turned to painting. Then I noticed something odd. The paint instructions on the instruction sheet does not match the colors used on the box art. Hmm. I decided to go with what's in the instructions.  I started by applying Rustoleum white paint/primer. There was need to fix some seam lines on the hull, then a repaint.

 The rest of the painting went without incident, and I'm calling this one done. In the finished images, note that the side port hole windows are made with  Microscale Kristal Klear. Thanks for looking. 

 

Hard to see. There's 3 pilots in there.