New

Santa has been dropping boxes off for the past month. So I thought I share whats in the boxes. First I got it into my head that I can start making my own figures. So besides signing up with Troy McDevitt's sculpting class thru Patreon, I got myself  a stand to help stead any future works of "art." ;)

Then there's a kit from Creepytables that looks a little like a certain caterpillar in a certain story about a certain girl in the 22cm size. ;)

 I refound Monster Dork Studios on Etsy, and picked up his take on Cookie Monster - COOKIE!

Finally Space Cadet Models released kit #2, A kit of Pioneer 2 and 4. As of now Space Cadet is only on Facebook, but they have their page set to Public so no one has to join FB that doesn't want to just to have a look.
As a fan of the vintage space craft, I'm looking forward to getting to these.

Space Cadet Huygens Lander part

This session starts out with a correction. I showed my WIP images on the Real Space Modelers Yahoo Group. The next morning I had a few "atta-biys" but there was one from one of the kits designers saying "Good Job", but also letting me know that while I might not be able to fix it at that point, I installed the landing radar upside down. Oops. 
I couldn't leave well enough alone and with the thought that I would be scratch building new landing radar out of styrene, I careful tried prying them off the Lander. One after another they easily popped off! When I got to the 4th one, I was in dread thinking one of them has to give me trouble. But no, number 4 popped as easily as the other 3.  I simply turned them around and glued them back on. 

While the glue was drying I turned my attention the the base. The instructions said that due to ... something I don't remember the real color of Titan was a color between wood and dark brown. I decided to lay down some Orange Ocher as a base to start. From there with the sun streaming in the window I decided to paint a shadow for the craft.  I also added some "ice" to the ground and was happy.

After that I turned my paint to the Lander. The instructions said it was a combination of gold and silver. I went with V's Gold and Silver from the new Metallics line.  The image has it looking too silver. But in real life it's more gold.  Experiments get painted next time.  Thanks for looking.

Brit Zombie finale

These pics are the combination of 2 sessions. I toyed around with the bruising and wounds. When happy I sealed them and painted in the eyes. I decided one of the eyes was going to be a dead eye, and put silly Putty around it as a mask - 

From there I added some Satin poly here and there, and some Gloss for the real gooey parts. 
While that was drying I drybrushed the skull mound base with various tans, creams and whites, and then put some Citadel sepia wash into the airbrush and sprayed a few areas. 
Finally I drew a few lines of Realistic Water on a piece of plastic. I wanted some drool...  When the drool strands were dry I picked the best one and stuck it onto the lip, and am calling this one done. Thanks for looking.

Space Cadet's Huygens Lander part 4

This session was to  assemble the Huygens Atmospheric Structure Instrument (HASI).  First thing that needed to be done was cut the two pieces off the PE fret.  Then a resin piece was added to make the "T' on the short side. After that I had to laminate 1mm half round styrene strips onto the straight parts. I thought this would be a lot harder than it was, save for my first cut which was short.

Next was to add the mounting base. On the instructions it said to leave a little PE showing that would mate up with a slot in the hole for the HASI.  No good. I could see the slot but the were no way I could fit the PE in there. I ended up just drilling out the hole, eliminating the slot and trimmed the exposed PE to fit. 

That was essentially it. They made further instructions for those wishing to do more.  I wasn't going to but then I saw one step was to add wiring for the parachute jettison on top. Being crazy, I took some .010 lead wiring and added that one.  Came out ok.

Next stop is the paint booth. The instructions and images show a gold/silver color. That's next time. Thanks for looking. 

Brit Zombie part 2

Today I added the "skin" over the noodling on the zombie. For this I turned to Army Painter's Necrotic Flesh. 

After that I added some bruising to the skin and some ivory to where the bone is exposed. Thanks for looking. 

Space Cadet Huygens Lander Part 3

Moving along, todays session was to finish adding the rest of the fins on the bottom of the lander. 
Just as soon as I thought I had a system down, things would go wrong and I'd have to come up with another "system".  Also have a fin jump out of the tweezers and have to go searching took time as well. But they are all in now. :D Are they all straight? No way. But they're in. ;)  
Thanks for looking. 

The Brit Zombie

I found this model after stumbling across a You Tube video of  a channel of  guy called The Dark Power. He is a sculptor, model maker and special effects enthusiast based in London, England.
One of  sculpt videos he did was this zombie. The next video showed him molding and casting it. It looked great. In the video he also offered a casting for sale. I couldn't resist. While zombies aren't really my thing, this one piqued my interest. Made contact and a week a box arrived from England - it was my Zombie.

I cleaned him up and got rid of the few seam lines. I needed to be careful with this resin as it's very brittle. Then my usual double coat of primer - 

  
My latest session with him I did the noodle approach to make it looks like something going on under the undead skin and give it a little more interest - 

There's the skin to go on, plus a lot of bone, and gore to go. Stand by for that, and thanks for looking. 

 

Space Cadet Huygens Lander Part 2

I must have been really cranky last time, with what looks like a less than stellar review. Apologies for that. It really is a nicely done, detailed kit. 
Being the kit does have a lot of small parts I'm still taking my time on this. 

This session, I finished building and installing the landing radar - the 4 PE parts that look like shelves. I then started cutting out and installing the fins on the bottom (red arrow).  These take time. Besides cutting the part off the fret you need to get rid of any nub that remains, what slows you down is the fin is prolly one 1mm or so long. Tough for my big sausage fingers. :P 
Thanks for looking. 

Harry Finale

The major step this session was painting in the eyes. A web check of the eye color of Kevin Peter Hall turned up nothing. Most of the images show him with green eyes so that's where I went.  When dry, onto the tree he went. Merry Christmas and thanks for looking everyone.

Space Cadet Huygens Lander

The real space genre got a little more crowded with the formation of Space Cadet  Models. These guys have started their catalog with the Huygens probe that went to Saturn with Cassini and landed on the moon Titan.  More here -  LINK . 
On to the model. Opening the box you have a few pages of what look like instructions, a well detailed base. The major parts of the probe are very well detailed. Then I see that there's a gouge on the edge of the dome portion of the lander. Dang. But it can be filled. The myriad of TINY parts for the probe are extremely well detailed. A large fret of Photo etch also looks well done - 

Harry Christmas

It was only a few days after my latest "New" post, that the Harry from Harry & the Henderson Christmas ornament showed up. Produced by my friends at Gillman Productions, it's an excellent bubble free piece. 

After priming black, I started the base coating - 

Here's where I always try something - which doesn't work - and then have to backtrack. I tried a highlight to the skin that ended up being too yellow. Looking at screen grabs of Harry, he has quite a rosy complexion.
The I added a highlight to the brown fur that IMHO was too red. Time to start again.
I also wanted to start coloring in the eyes and teeth. I wanted to use V's White Gray, but being very thin, I added Iraqi Sand first.

Finally to end Part 1, I added the gray fur to age him up a little bit. 
Thanks for looking. 

 

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 -