Saurosuchus and Dinodontosaurus Finale

Continuing on, I painted the Sauro a sort of orange brown - 

From there it was a quick run to the finish line. I added Hull Red down the back and then a dark wash to create speckles. 
I had a few plastic plants in the drawer. So I primed them and then did a dark green up from the bottom and a lighter green from the top down (always paint plastic plants or they will keep looking plastic!).  
I was done. Thanks for looking.

The Marauder Part 2

With the repositioning and puttying done, it's time to paint. Looking at screen shots, the animal is mostly gray and more gray. Too boring - so I decided I'd put a little patterning on it.  
But first I painted the mouth - again adding a little color. The mouth was washed with  some purple, added highlights of flesh color to the high points, and then washed it in Army Painter skin wash to even it all out. The teeth were painted in pale gray, and still looked a little dark so I gave it some gray white to brighten it. I clear coated the mouth with Satin and then glued in the mandible- 

You can see a little of the mottling on the legs - a black wash over a gray basecoat. The creases were sculpted a little heavy handed in some places. I didn't want to accentuate those, but the dark wash went into some of the other larger creases. 

Turning to the wings, I base coasted the bottom skin parts with flesh, and then did the vein squiggles with purple. In the film you see their guts a sort of green blue when exposed, so why not purple under the skin? ;)  When dry I added a mist coat of gray to put the "veins" under the skin. 
Its a little hard to see, but I also airbrushed purple stripes to the bottom of the eye stalks.

For the top, I just outlined the bony parts and then did some black wash squiggles - with a brush this time. Squiggles closest to the bones got a second layer, further away got just one. Thanks for looking. 

 

The Jinmenju

For something in the out of the ordinary file we have the Jinmenju. 
Jinmenju (人面樹, Jinmenju) is a strange tree with human faced fruits called jinmenshi, human-faced child. The tree is said to be found in remote valleys from the south of Japan and China. 
The fruit of the tree looks like a human head. It doesn’t say a word, but it is constantly laughing. It is said that if the fruit laughs too heartily, it falls from the tree. Most people think of yokai as some kind of monster, but the Jinmenju is a type of yokai called choshizen, or super-nature, which includes mysterious plants and animals. 
when I was searching for images of what this tree was all about, I came across this one - 

While I suppose hearing constant laughing while you're walking alone in a dark forest can be creepy, looking at the model from CMON's Rsing Sun miniature game gave it a horror face more like the girl from the Grudge - 

So I sort of split the difference and used the red fruit color for the horror face. Two layers of foam, some Sculpt A Mold, and static grass, and this was a quick build and paint up. Thanks for looking.

 

Morea's Spiderman

I'm usually not a superhero model builder. But when I saw this model was designed as a wall hanger, I bought it. 
The model came in 3 pieces of cream colored resin. There were a few bubbles on his shoulders. while cleaning them up to add the Aves, one turned out to be rather large - 

Then as I filled those and turned to another little one, it turned out to be another large one. No worries Aves to the rescue - 

Then a dumb thing was done.  I took the wrapped parts out of the shipping box and threw the rest away. Then when I went to look over the parts, it was discovered that two of the fingers snapped off in transit. If I was paying attention, getting them back on would have been a breeze. It wasn't to hard to drill out the stubs, add wire and then more Aves - 

While I still had a lump of quickly hardening Aves on the desk, I glued the leg on and filled the seam - 

That's enough for one day. Check back for more from your friendly neighborhood Spiderman!

The Great Cthulhu

Who? The best answer to this question is found in Lovecraft's tale "The Call of Cthulhu". Cthulhu is a monstrous entity who lies "dead but dreaming" in the city of R'lyeh.
In Lovecraft's story only the physical description of the monster was given; no colors or anything like that. So that part is up to our imagination. 

The kit came in 5 parts and was nicely cast in a cream resin. There were a few bubbles, but no real indications of seam lines. Here he is just resting on a coral or volcanic base as I glued the head on and Aves on the neck. You can see the wings in the background - 

The wings are fairly thin and I had to think of how I was going to build this. Do I just want to build it and never transport it anywhere? No. I decided the answer was to install magnets to  take them on and off for transport and then display. But first I needed to mask the seamline. So out came the Aves and I made a little ridge to disguise the join line -

Then the magnets. You can also see the the body has been connected to the base. The tail was actually part of the base. So the seam to be filled was on the rump - 

Thanks for looking.

Pitch Black Marauder

Pitch Black was  a film that was released in 2000. It's about a commercial transport ship and its crew are marooned on a barren desert planet,  M6-117, full of bloodthirsty creatures that only come out to feast at night. But then, they learn that a month-long eclipse is about to occur.It was the first time I was introduced to the character Riddick. But the star of this post is the animals they discover as the eclipse begins, and these guys come out of their underground hiding spot. In the movie they didn't have a name. The model was called a Marauder, but looking online, they were called a Bioraptors. So you can take your pick.

Being they only came out at night, and an uninhabited planet is very dark, you never really got a good look at these monsters.  Only by getting a look at different screen grabs do you get a full picture of what it looked like.

Only way after the fact did you get a look at behind the scenes pics of what it looked like - 

The model kit came in 8 pieces, of a gray resin. There were no bubbles, and some seam lines. But the odd part was that it was modeled almost directly after (from what I can tell)the concept art - 

The odd part being this weird ballerina stance. all the different poses you saw in the movie and they pick this? If it wasn't the only kit that I saw, I would have passed on this version.

But anyway the building begins. Lining the various parts up for pinning, I discovered that no matter which way I turned the head, I couldn't get it to line up with the neck. It was almost as if there was a piece of the neck missing - 

 No worries, with Aves, all problems can be solved. So there was some Aves work on the neck, wings, tail, where the legs  meet the body and then the ankles. what I decided to do was make the monster in flight around one of their "smokestack" exit tubes, so I cut the weird ankle joints and positioned them straight down and slightly backward - 

And with that, it was time to call this session for the day. Thanks for looking.

Saurosuchus and Dinodontosaurus

These next few models builds come from the discovery of that stash I found in the attic. This one is the Saurosuchus and Dinodontosaurus vignette. Sculpted by Chris Lynch and was offered by Ravenstar Studios. which oddly enough offers mostly sci-fi vehicles and mech miniatures.  As a matter of fact when I couldn't remember the names of these animals I did remember Ravenstar. When I went looking they are no longer in the Store.  I wrote and was told the names, as well as being reminded it is a very old kit

The kit depicts  the carnivore Saurosuchus taking down a Dinodontosaurus on, from the rounded stones, a river bank.  The model was very nicely done in the cream color, odorless resin. There was one or two bubbles on the bottom of the log (out of sight) and only 1 small shift in the mold that was easily repaired - 

 Giving it another look, all was well so it was primed.  

Now's the time to start picking out colors. The ground was painted a brown color and the rocks and logs were left primer black as they will get a dry brushing later on. The Dinodont got a base coat of ocher. I'm still thinking about the Sauro. ;)

Stay tuned for part Two. Thanks for looking.

Hannibal of Carthage

The second bust I picked up with Vlad was Hannibal. He comes from Black Heart Models and is very well done - no bubbles and only the faintest of a seamline. First step after a washing is to prime - 

While I would have thought that Hannibal was on Middle Eastern decent (I don't know why) the sculpt is made to looks distinctly African. So that's the way we're going to go. After a base coat in Leather Brown, it just made him look weird. So I started again with a Black Brown.  From there I had a Dark Flesh, but that was too yellow and too light. I'm always jumping too far when making my highlights. So once again a redo with the Black Brown. This time I took a little Flesh and added it to the Black brown. For each each highlight, I just added a tiny bit more of the flesh. The beard was left the Black Brown darkened with a few coats of Citadel's Nuln Oil. His eyes were first done in the Leather Brown, but I thought this made the bust too monotone, so they were redone with Green Violet.

I wanted to make the helmet leather instead of some kind of metal, and using the leather brown would make the whole bust too dark, so I used red Leather on the helmet and chest protector. The straps were painted an ocher orange. 

The easiest thing would be to make the animal skin to be a lion and just use some golden yellow color, but no, I have to be different. So I looked up Africa's other cat - the Leopard. 
The Leopard's spots are really between 3 and 5 smaller spots in a crude circle. To add interest, I made the inside of the circle a bit lighter. As you get toward the Leopard's legs and belly the color changes from an orange to almost white. The spots also become small and are single spots. This is what I tried. 

The band of the helmet and the medallions were banded in Bronze with a silver highlight. I liked it and decided to quit while I was ahead.  Thanks for looking. 

 

When Something Old is New Again

Yesterday was a hot one in the hobby den despite the AC going. It was so hot in fact that the parchment paper I use on the wet palette was drying up before my eyes. I gave up painting for the day.
Then it hit me that I had a box of garage kits in a crawl space up here, and I'm sure the heat is no good for them. I decided to pull them out. Well, it turns out that I did not have 1 box, but 3 !!
Some of the kits I only had the vaguest memory of, and some I didn't remember at all.

In the end my stash grew my 1/3!  I'm going to have to build faster. 😁

Christopher Lee Dracula

This is one of the newest offering's from John Dennett's MoonDevil Studio. It's a two piece kit - the bust and base, in a bubble free resin. There is only the faintest remnant of a seam line across the top of his head and it too no time to make invisible. 

While I always picture vampires to be these pasty pale people.  Lee was none of that. The most I saw was, in a few pics, was they used (IMHO) too much powder to mask his 5 o'clock shadow. This was the pics I used -

I started off with my usual Beige Red for the skin base - 

From there it was a simple matter of filling in all the base colors I wanted - 

I was going to go out and get that Rustoleum Stone paint for the base. It's a type of paint that's basically some sort of gray, but somehow it spits out whit, black, and sometimes beige to form what looks like a rock. But- hehe -I was too lazy (maybe next time) and used used a dark gray base, with light gray highlights. I then used Vallejo's grime effects to make the green schmutz, and also Citadel's Mephiston Red to create some blood splatter.

The face was done as I usually do, in that I did simple highlights gradations, and then tried out some pastels to make shadows, and before I knew it I was done. Thanks for looking. 

Vincent Price part 2

This session I kept refining the face and hair - 

Then moved on and base coated the jacket, shirt and tie - 

Then finally got to the point where I was done. The shine on the tie may be too much...  Thanks for looking.