Sunflowers & Mistakes

Following the theme of Plants vs Zombies and being the Christmas season, I decided to add a few more models to my grandson's collection. An obvious choice was a sunflower, the source of all the energy needed to fight those dreaded zombies. This of course follows the Ra zombie whose power it is to steal the sunflower's suns and so a sunflower was really needed to combat him.
It looked like a fairly easy job, a flower head, a stalk and a leafy base, but appearances can be deceiving especially when stupid decisions stuff things up. This build was full of them!

The head was made the same way most models are, that is a core of crushed foil was covered by a final layer of epoxy putty. Once cured, around the margin of the form a groove was cut, ( with a thin cutting wheel in a motor tool), that would accommodate the plastic petals and these were super glued in place. No problems so far, that was easy, and a big mistake. I had neglected to add the face into the putty while it was still soft! My god, the face is only two eyes and a smiley mouth, how hard could it have been?
Too bad, I'll scribe them in later, it'll be just fine - oh yeah.

 

 

I had decided to make moulds of these so that (a) I'd have copies and (b) the final flower would be resin and therefore lighter. This is the second layer of silicon rubber poured with the registration knobs evident. It doesn't show the painful process of burying the master in plasticine and the amount of fiddling work to get those damn petals cleanly sealed ready for the silicon addition.

With the previous models such as the Peashooter, the leaves at the base posed a problem as they were made of pure putty and therefore quite hard but brittle. I needed to be able to make them out of resin. This is the master for 6 leaves which would be cast, removed while soft and formed to the correct shape  then added to the bottom of the stalk. Mistake No.2. They were too small,- measure twice, make once.

 

 

Here's how the moulds looked for the head and the leaves. Because the leaves were a single sided form they only required a rudimentary wall of plasticine to contain the silicon.

 

I am always pleased when moulds I have made work and so at this point I was feeling good about things. It was only once the leaf resin was poured that I realised that they would not do, but this was no big deal and some larges ones finally made the grade.

 

The same cannot be said for these. Yes they came out of the moulds well and cleaned up ok but resin is not the best material to try to scribe into. It is inherently 'bubbly', and as such does not allow a clean incised line to be made, at least at the scale I was working on.

Apart from the fact that I dropped one (slippery bugger), you can see the simple lines are rough. Not good enough.
Back to the master and a bit of grinding on the more bulbous side would allow me to add fresh putty, place the features correctly and re- mould the whole thing.

This is the tool I had to make that would become a  virtual stamp for the long oval eyes. It is a piece of cured putty which will have an oval concavity drilled into it.

Yes there is a reason to smile. The tool worked well and the facial features are cleanly defined. Now to starting the mould making process all over again.

Here is a close-up of that painful plasticine sealing process. If the plasticine is not right up to the edge of the master, everywhere, then the silicon rubber will find its way in to any crevice and form a barrier to any subsequent resin formation.
Why did I make a circular mould box? It seemed a good idea at the time but really it only added to the litany of errors that this build was plagued with.

Something that worked! This is the bending and forming setup I used to create the correct shape of the leaves. Plasticine or Kleen Klay is great stuff for that temporary holding, bending, stabilising use you may have. Here I was able to hold 4 leaves in the centre (with a golf tee), bend them down and flip up their tips while the resin was still soft, and have them in this shape until the resin had hardened.
Because most of the plants in the game have these base leaves, I will have little trouble with this aspect of any new models. HA! Spoken too soon.

 

 

 GW, ( Warhammer) plastic bases are ideal for these models as they match each other and can be glued with standard plastic cement. This is the set up I used for my flower bases with pre bent aluminium wire threaded through one GW base to be trapped inside by another and super glued to within an inch of its life.

Ah Kneadit! Great strong stuff that is so quick to use in places where something has to be held forever. It not only does the holding but it can be textured to look as if it actually were part of the whole affair.

One of the problems with modelling these computer game images is that they are rarely seen from the back. I remember that was a particular problem with Korpus Festerheart, being a painting, and I suppose these plants/zombies are the same. What was the back of this flower like?
Most flowers have modified petals that enclose the bud called sepals (part of the calyx), and when the flower is fully open these sepals are seen at the base of the flower head. It was a simple job to model these and cast them in resin.

Here are the moulds for the new head and the smaller one for the sepals. This was made much faster than the big one in that it was moulded with Pinkysil Putty, which allows a flat master to be pressed into a much faster curing form of silicon rubber.

 The new and very round flower head moulds. Now I remember why I made them round! Because I had to make them twice I thought I would save some silicon if they were round to conform with the circular face of the flower. I didn't take into account the fact that round things aren't stable and the whole process of pouring resin into a small hole that wants to roll was going to be a pain.

All's well that ends well and the flowers came together. They were undercoated with the correct paint this time (Citadel Skull White) and the first colour added, Sunburst Yellow.

These pics show the painting process using Citadel acrylics, Vomit Brown for the face and Snot Green for the stem and leaves. In some areas the colour was brushed on for an initial coverage then air brushed to finish off.

Finished and posed with some definitely shady looking characters.
Just as an aside, one of these  flowers is going to my 4yr. old grandson, and another one is going to my 93yr. old mother- just because it is a happy thing and happiness should be able to span 4generations.