Vladislav as a Cat in Clay

 Ever since the Sculpting Patreon group I was part of dissolved, I had a hard time coming up with ideas for something to do. So I ended up doing nothing. Until "What We Do" showed up on a cable channel.

One of the lesser known movies that I really like to watch over and over is the mock-umentary What We Do In The Shadows. It is the inspiration for the TV series of the same name. 

In the movie however, a film crew follows 4 vampires in New Zealand. The each have their various quirks, and one, Vladislav the Poker, played by Clement Jermaine.  Vlad was very good at transforming, until his difficult breakup with his girlfriend- The Beast.   From then on he could still transform but now he "couldn't get the faces right."  

The camera switches away to show Vlad as a cat but with a human face. 

This had to be brightened a lot to see what was gong on. 

 Now I knew what I wanted to do. While I'm not good at likenesses (and prolly never will be) how badly could I mess this up?  So I got to work and ended up with my version of Vlad Cat. I was thinking about casting a few before painting so he's still Sculpy gray.  Thanks for looking. 

 

Rebel Finale

Click HERE for part 2.

 

For the glaze for the face, I used a Thinner Medium by Vallejo. It's basically the paint "carrier" without any pigment. With water you get dilute it down to where the pigments separate out. With this medium, you can go a lot thinner than with water. I thought I had a pic of it but no. 

Moving on I added a number of red highlights for the jacket. One the back I decided to use a b&W blend for the lettering on top of a black background.  Early on I added some Rustoleum Chrome for the switch blade. It was now when I added black to the handle, dotting it with silver. I also added silver to the jackets zipper.  With that I was done. Thanks for looking. 

 

Rebel part 2

Click HERE for part 1.  

Whew, still a struggle to get up into the studio. On top of that, the new AC isn't as effect as my old one. Despite it being on nearly all the time, some days it's just too hot to stay up there.  My next place will be better suited for year round model building.

Anyway, the first thing was to get to James' face and I filled in the basics. Having filled the face in an adding a little shading. I didn't like it.  

 I remember back to watching all those Rafael Robledo Jr. videos  where he speckled a number of colors on his faces before hitting it with the flesh. Now he used a Filbert brush to throw the speckles. He was able to get really tiny ones. I couldn't get them small enough. I realized that if I dropped the air pressure of the a/b to nearly zero, I could get speckles. So I speckled away, with a little Silly Putty to preserve the dark hair. 

 The with a little flesh color I got the uneven skin look I was after. I've also been watching a ton of videos where glazes is used instead of washes, but that'll be for next time.  

 Thanks for looking.

Zuppo's Rebel

 Next up is another kit from Miguel Zuppo. It's James Dean as seen in the 1955 film Rebel Without A Cause. The it is 1/4 scale and in white resin. It is numbered as 8 of 20. There seems to have been a bubble or two but Miguel made them disappear with what looks like gray Aves or the like. 

As usual I started working before I realized I never took a "before" pic.  All thats there is Stynylrez brown primer. 

 

White T shirt is white primer

Thanks for the autograph :)

I had forgotten whether this movie was B&W or color so I did a quick search - and there are a lot of both. But enough color pics to send me in that direction. I guess seeing so many B&W images, I thought he was in his usual black leather jacket. The red jacket surprised me, but let's go. Starting out with a black/purple red I laid down the base coat for the jacket. The white T shirt is protected with Silly Putty. 

 That's where we'll leave it for now. Thanks for looking.

CGS Wyatt Earp

 Wow, it's been a while. I've been building but just couldn't get around to filing a post here.  Aah well. What I have is a 200 mm Wyatt Earp from CGS Models.

The one thing I'm not really crazy about is their bases. To me, they seem just too small. So I have these decayed "wood" (resin actually) from Green Stuff World.

I couldn't resist base painting the face.

 In the movie Tombstone Kurt Russell is always in dark pants and jacket, with a dark hat. so I just continued that here.

Trying something new I decided I would paint the shadow of the hat onto Wyatt's face and not just rely on the actual shadow to do the work.

Starting work on the hands and rifle. Here I noticed that the rifle barrels were warped. The old hot water trick worked like a charm.

 

The arms were added to the hands and shoulders. I was like a juggling match to get everything lined up.

Putting the head on, I noticed that the sculptor, in sculpting the head separately mad Wyatt look straight ahead as in earlier pics. However leaving it like that looked a little silly. I went back and despite the pupils being sculpted, I ignored that, and put the pupils as if he was looking from the side. Now it looks like he's looking down the barrel as in the screen grab. With that I was done, and he can take his place next to the earlier Doc Holiday. 

 

 

Trying Army Painter's Speed Paint

I first saw this product on FB a few months ago. I guessing it is their answer to Citadel's Contrast Paints.  Speed Paint seems to be in between regular acrylic paint and washes. Being thicker than a wash the paint will tint a painting area, while at the same time being thin enough, it will gather into the recesses creating some shadows. The whole trick is to using the speed paint over a matte white primer or some other light color. It was even tried over a light metallic with some interesting positive results. 

 

When finally released it came as two choices, the Starter pack Comes with 10 paints in dropper bottles, which included a stainless steel mixing ball in the bottle. AP also includes a paint brush. They create their own names for their brushes, so there is no number but to me it looks like a slightly stubby No. 2 brush. But this is what you need. The Speed Paint needs to go on fairly thick.

 

Alternatively you can get the Mega-pack which contains 23 paints (plus Speed Paint Medium). This set gives you a few choices of red, green, blue and brown, rather than just one choice with the starter set.  It also comes with the same No. 2 brush and mixing ball. I got the Mega set through Amazon, and that seller included a small container of AP foliage - lichen of 3 different colors.  All of this for $99. A bit more expensive than buying regular paint, but it's supposed to take care of 3 different paints - base coat, highlight and shadow.

 

 

Picking out my figure, I didn't want to waste the paint (or my time if things went bad) by painting a large figure. So a 32mm figure was the victim. 

 

I missed the first recommendation that the paints should go on a hard palette and not a wet palette. The reason is to keep the paint from soaking thru the paper into the sponge. But as I use parchment paper, and had no bleed thru. 

I wasn't really concerned with historical accuracy of the Viking. I just wanted to see how many colors I could use and what they looked like. 

 

I decided to put out one color at a time, and came up with my first Con: I was surprised how most all colors directly out of the bottle is VERY dark. It was hard to tell whether that puddle was brown blue or green. This is where the hard palette or a type with little wells pays off. 

 

All the colors did what they said they were going to do -kept the highlights bright while darkening the shadows. Any excess puddles can be reabsorbed with the paintbrush. If I put a paint down and didn't like the color, I flooded the area with water and wiped the still wet paint away. I dried the area and then put down the new color.

 

The 2nd Con occurred when I didn't allow the first coat to fully dry. It is in the how-to that the new coat will reactivate the first one and you will get a mess. You will see this on the front of my Viking. Each paint bottle has a triad shield on it. That's not a design but indicates how dark multiple layer will look.

 

You can really see how well the base/ highlight/shadows work on the wooden shield though. In the end, I got carried away and added a little silver here and there to the figure.Regular acrylic paint goes over a dried Speed Paint with no problem

 

 

I think this is a very good product; especially for the modelers who build armor, or aviation (any model with a figure) and don't really want to take the time to learn to paint figures. The only situation where this may not work out for someone is if the modeler is a real stickler for accuracy. The shad of blue you want may not be the shade of blue they have.  But if you think as long as it's close I'm good, then this is for you.  I'm guessing that if and when the line takes off, they will add more colors. But remember you can always add regular paint too.

 

Two thumbs up from me, and thanks for looking.

 

 

Z-95 Finale

 This final session had me completing the weathering al la Night Shift style, putting the pilot in the seat and securing the canopy. Once again the pilot sat too tall, so I sat him on a coarse sanding sponge and got rid of most of his butt. 

The canopy went on pretty easy with the ledge around the area to aim for.  I found some nondescript decals for the wings and as usual where something has to go wrong - one came off the paper stuck to the model and would not be moved. Rather than scraping it all off I just left it as is.  

The final duty was  to give it all a matte coat. One thing I saw on Jon Bius' channel was to add 'a kiss of tan" to the clear coat. I touched the brush to the Dark Sand dropper bottle and then swirled it in the matte coat in the a/b cup. It barely turned the clear coat a color, but as you can see in the pics it all softly evened out the different colors I used.  With that I was done. Thanks for looking. 

 

The pilot checking you out