The Thing's Childs Finale

 If you haven't seen part One yet go HERE. 

Allowing a few days to calm down, and started on Take 3 for the portrait. By this time I was getting good at it (IMHO). ;)  

Getting that done is was on to the rest of the bust. There are only a few instances when you see Childs with his parka. One was when they were ducking down in the hallway - 

 But seeing him at the end, even with the odd lighting it appears that his parka is quite dirty. But the blue has to go down first. I coated the entire thing V's Dark Prussian Blue, and then hit the upper areas with just Prussian blue. Finally I added a light blue to the Prussian Blue for the last highlight.  Then I realized this would be all moot when the dirt when on. Sigh. 

Turning to the back of his head, I fixed the drip from last session, added the appendages and adjusted the colors a little bit. For the tentacles I used the Florescent Green, and the finger/arm I used a light flesh color. The flesh was toned down with some Reikland Fleshshade, and the green with some green tinted UV resin. I also made a gooey drip with it. 

 Putting the post together I realized I never took images of a WIP of the base. It was painted with various metallic colors and then washed in some rust. There was a few stains added with V's Oily Earth wash. I then mixed up some Woodland Sceneics SNOW, matte medium, little bit of white paint, and some Pearl paint. I slathered it over the sculpted snow and was done with that.  I painted the bottle green, and then added a darker color hoping to mimic there being some drink still left in it. The glove was painted brown. Then the parka, and arm/glove was dusted unevenl6t with MIG's European Dust PIGMENT.  I finally glued the bottle to the glove, the glove/arm to the bust and the bust to the base. I was glad to get this one off my desk.  Thanks for looking. 

 

The Thing's Childs

 Having a few collections to complete I decided that Childs from the 1982 movie The Thing was desk on the table. The character, Childs, was played by actor Keith David, and was the base's mechanic. Keith points out that Child's breaks the Horror film trope that "the black guy never makes it to the end of the film."  He is part of the Childs/McReady controversy in that who was the Thing at the end...

 The kit came in 7 parts - the bust, base, gloved hand, whiskey bottle, and 3 appendages. The likeness is spot on and the casting as usual with Gillman is nearly flawless.  With this piece, the Yagher, the sculptor, gives away two of his ideas of how things ended. Number one the base is created to look like a generator, which answers MeReady's question :How's the generator," and Garry answers "It's gone, MacReady!" As a sidebar Garry was his last name. On the character list he was M.T. Garry. 

 The Yagher also gives his opinion of whether Childs or McReady, neither or both were infected. From the front Child's portrait is spot on. But from the back you see his head is split open and all sort's of gooey things are emerging. 

As usual I start with the portrait. I don't get to do dark skin all that much so I was glad I picked up a number of Army Painter skin double triads (6 colors that all blend) . I started withe the darkest one, and then I really didn't like many of the companion colors as they seemed too desaturated. I had seen another painter use oranges to highlight the skin, so I turned to my set of rust paints.  A few different layers and I was liking what I had so far. 

 Turning to the back of the head I added various reds and oranges to make the wound. My thoughts on wounds and blood is that a little goes a long way. I went too far, so I got some Agrax Earthshade to darken down the crevices and ended my session there. 

Coming back to it the next day I see disaster struck. I had angled the bust face down at an angle so the wash would dry in all the recesses. What it did was to rundown the head and then gravity would take it around to the bottom which from that angle was the face.  I now had this  dark stripe running across the face and down to the chin where it dried. I tried lightly getting it off. It didn't really work that well. So I got out the paints and had Take 2 of doing the portrait. After getting it fixed, I sprayed it with a matte clear to protect the new paint (which I didn't do the first time). Tragedy struck again as the matte clear coat instantly frosted. I had heard that if you quickly spray it with a gloss, the frost goes away. The frost did go away - mostly. Disgusted, I chose to walk away rather than whip it off the wall. Check back.

Exorcist Regan

 I have had the busts of the two priests from The Exorcist on my shelf now for some time- Fr. Karras, and Fr. Merrin .   To finish off the trilogy Regan was also offered, but the sculpt was too good and it was just too creepy for me.  Move time fwd and Artist/producer Saul Alvarez of Silver Screen Icons has come up with another Regan. This time a little less creepy (IMHO). :D

 

 

The kit comes in 5 3D printed parts - the head, the body, the base, and then a head and base of the idol Pazuzu.  There is also a copy of the movie poster that fits into the base frame. Excellent idea for future movie models. 

 The kit looked pretty benign, so I epoxied the 3 main parts together, in what turned out to an early mistake. Turns out there are spots the way the hair is done that reveals openings to the dress/nightgown that can be seen and it was rather difficult to get primer in there. But with a little effort the job got done. 

Next, as usual for me was to add color to the face. This too was a little tricky as looking at screen grabs there are seemingly always  color filters over the lights. Do I paint it normally or do I give it that creep blue color? I decided to do it normally. Normal is a loaded word with her under possession, she was painted with pale sickly colors. Thankfully I bought a few triads of flesh color schemes. ;) 

 Her hair was brown and the nightgown was a pale blue so that was completed easily. Thinking back to the movie, when Fr. Merrin was excavating the dig site, and finding the little Pazuzu head it was a sort of dirty brown. So I decided to make the base a simple dulled down brown color. The base also has some imagery of Pazuzu, so I highlighted them.  To make the portrait a little more gross, I mixed some florescent green with UV resin and added a few drops to her mouth and gown.

The movie poster needed a little trim, and then easily glued into the frame and I was done. 

One thing I would have done differently is since the base was 3D printed hollow, it's very light. I'm so used to the bases being big chunks of solid resin. So I think I would add some weight to the base.  Thanks for looking. 

 

 

 

Alice in Wonderland

 Shock of shocks! ;) I'm building a kit that hasn't sat in my stash for years. ;) This kit was picked up at at my local scale MODEL CLUB meeting a few months ago. Thanks Mike I.  Alice was sculpted by ELLA ARTS. And I've seen STL's over at Cults.

Alice is approx 1/10the scale  and was printed in a way that there was next to no grow lines nor dimples or "pimples". 

 Just jumping right in after cleaning and priming I tackled all the skin tones, and then turn to the blue dress - 

 

While that was drying I turned my attention to the base. It also gave me the chance to try out the new Army Painter Speed Paints 2.0.  I picked out a few colors and went to town. They went on very nicely, and even went thru the airbrush very well. 

The first pic is a little dark, but the second shows how the scene will look. At one point I put the kit base onto a wooden base - just so the painted surface wouldn't constantly be handled.

 

While I was at it, I painted up the Cheshire Cat. I just used the same colors as the example. I Also added the details to Alice's portrait. 

 

Next was to start to put the parts together and while doing that I painted the white articles of clothing - 

 

The other little thing I did was to add some of my new florescent paint set to the mushrooms and cat's eyes. The UV light really makes them shine!  I decided to leave the little head adornment off. seemed very fragile. 

It was simple to complete all the parts and I was done! Thanks for looking.

 

Lost Boys' Star

 Boy, seems I'm constantly playing catch-up lately. Earliest images of the Star kit I took come from February...  :P

In case you don't know, Star is  is Michael's love interest and a member of David's gang, though she is only half-vampire, having resisted her thirst for human blood. She helps Michael, Sam and the Frog Brothers to battle the gang, seeing it as a way out of her and Laddie's nightmarish existence. After the head vampire Max is killed, Star becomes fully human again and apparently enters a relationship with Michael.  s love interest and a member of David's gang, though she is only half-vampire, having resisted her thirst for human blood. She helps Michael, Sam and the Frog brothers to battle the gang, seeing it as a way out of her and Laddie's nightmarish existence. After the head vampire Max is killed, Star becomes fully human again and apparently enters a relationship with Michael.  She is played by actress Jami Gertz.

 I kind of forget the scale I had the 3D file printed, but I think it's 1/10 or 1/12th.  The printing was done by a friend over at Gillusions, from a file by Diklich Arts.  

The kit came in 6 parts including two heads, body, two arms, two feet and a base-

Getting it together was no problem, tho - my fault - I did line up one of the arms crooked. 

The next was getting the info for the painting, and while looking at the example paint job, she was wearing a white shirt, and a pink/magenta long skirt. However looking at a screen grab of the skirt I was in for an interesting time. The designs was "interesting", not to mention the multi-color shawl she was wearing and that's featured in the kit. 

 

There's a lot of designs there, not to mention that waist belt she has. Plus looking at the screen grab, she has about 20 bracelets on, and I see a lot of different colors. I'm going to have to get my number 0 brush out along with my opti-visors...

I started with a simple flesh tone, brunette hair, and a belt with a lot of purple in it.  And the skirt base coat - 

 

 

Now to start the designs on the skirt - 

 

 

And that's where I'm, leaving it for now. I was seeing those square plinths with the high backs. So I was thinking of using one of those for star. I found a screen grab of the abandoned hotel lair the vampires use, and that may be my background. But that's next time. Thanks for looking. 

 

 

Victory 357 Hawk Ekranoplan Finale

 Continuing on, what seems weird to be is that the diagram didn't call for the window installation to come before I closed up the fuselage - like you'd usually see. OK, I'll play along. Since the interior is gone I sprayed some thinned Smoke color to tint the windows. 

 Next was to put on the tail wing/fin assembly, and then it was time for paint. After a coat of black primer, I tried a mottling pattern as seen on a video from a You Tuber. 

 The box art offered two  options - bare metal and a blue color. The fuselage was no where clean enough for bare metal so blue it was. After that the decals went on without problems, and some weathering. 

 Next it was time to install the windows, and just when things were going so well I got the smack in the face when the windows didn't fit. Did they need more sanding? were they really meant to go in earlier? I don't know. I tried to sand down the front window to know avail. I just ended up breaking it.

The next thing to try was taking some of the clear packaging plastic and make a wind shield out of that. Trial fittings showed it could be done, but a shim of sheet styrene was need to close the gap. Once the glue was all set up the plastic needed to be trimmed in some places. I also decided the windows needed to be shinier, so clear UV resin was applied over the windows and set with the light. 

 I saw somewhere that the plane was skimming across the water, and decided I'd make a little base to look like that. But with the blizzard that hit us and all the shoveling, I still haven't made it to Hobby Lobby for a box to use as a base. Til then it's sitting on a black cube. Thanks for looking. 

 

Victory 357 Hawk Ekranoplan

 I pulled this vehicle out of my stash as I was in the mood for something unusual. On site mentions it as the future that should have been. Another created a backstory for it: 

 In early 1929, Thomas T. Brown published an article in prestigious Science and Invention magazine. Article’s title was simple: How I Control Gravitation. However, the topic was anything but simple. Brown proved that using electrogravitics he could control gravity. 

 After few years the sector spun-off and become Gravity control propulsion research center. Soon large-scale tests proved that indeed gravity could be controlled. One of the experiment showed that a solid block of graphite with a mass of 500 kg doesn’t weigh the normal 4903 N but only 3236 N. Only 66% of original weight. 

Next phase was of course moving this new technology out of the laboratory in and into the field. Sparing no time a special vehicle, Victory 357 (Победа 357), was developed. It was basically an ekranoplan using three small jet engines for horizontal propulsion and an enormous 15,500 HP Kuznetsov NK-12 generator for powering electrogravitics elements. Generator provided enough electricity to reduce the weight of the vehicle from 160,000 N (16,315 kg) to 85.000 N (8.667 kg) making it a reasonably nimble ekranoplan with limited flying capabilities. 

The kit was made by AMP Models and is in 1:72 scale of detailed gray plastic. Having a quick look at the instructions gave me the first minus score to the kit - there's was just a few exploded views of where the parts basically go. I don't like that. 

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The first step, as is with most plane models is the cockpit. This is where I noticed another problem. The sprues are lettered but the parts are numbered on the instructions, but not on the sprues. No problem with some of the larger parts, but there's quite a few smaller parts that look similar. Oh boy! 

Edit: while there are no part numbers on the sprues, they do include a diagram of all the sprues and the corresponding numbers. -  

 This kit has a complete interior. There's the floor, the front and rear firewalls, a center control. There's two seats made made me smile in that they reminded me of chairs from a 1960's kitchen  :P There is also a very nice instrumentation panel. The details of the panel were a PE piece and I must admit it is the best looking panel I've ever seen. What I noticed pretty quickly was that pin "A" fitting into slot "B" is at a minimum. Most parts are just butt joined together. This leads to sometimes what happens is the part slides in the wet glue before it sets up.  Afterward I noticed the instrument panel was a little cockeyed. Dang! :(  Behind the pilot seats were two benches along each side. But being a nice interior I tried to give it the best paint job I could. 

 The next set was putting the interior into the body of the plane. This is where I noticed that all the careful painting was for nothing, when I noticed the size of the windows. 

When I went to close in the fuselage I came upon a BIG error. I don't know whether it's the kit or theme, but I couldn't get the two fuselage parts to meet. I tried several different ways for them to join but to no avail. I even started filing down the floor and firewalls... No good. 

 With the blood pressure rising, I ended up pulling the interior out. Not like you could really see in anyway. With the interior gone the fuselage went together with no effort. 

 The front grill was 2 pieces and was installed with little effort. I spent a bunch of time hopefully getting the seams to disappear. But with this sessions time running short I was threw on the pontoons and called it. check back for the finale. Thanks for looking.