Chicken Trophy and some zombies

CHICKEN TROPHY

I have a friend who is a teacher at the school where I last worked before I retired. He organises a relay race between the two school houses, where the runners carry a rubber chicken instead of a baton. This relay starts with the preschoolers and continues up through all the classes to the teachers and even to the parents who come to support their children.
He asked me if I could come up with a suitable trophy - a Chicken or Chook Trophy- to be awarded to the winning house and kept in their possession for a year. What could I say? It is such a crazy concept and should be fun to do and as I really enjoyed my time as the art teacher at that school, I was only too happy to give it a go.
This was the original idea for the trophy, a running chook in an athletic yet panicked attitude, atop a wooden base. Apart from some support items, (helping the one foot balance business), this is what they will be running for, for years to come

 

Here is a sketch of the model marking the hip and shoulder joints as well as the spine. These points will carry the major limbs and in this figure, they will convey all the intent of a running chicken.

As with the Clever Duck, I made two armatures, one for them and one for me. That is the original idea but the "me" one hardly ever gets made. Maybe this time?
A central plastic form was cut and strong soldered wire legs were added with a vertical extension of the middle toe to provide a join to the base.

 

This frontal view shows the work required to get the correct dimensions as well as strengthening  elements, for what will turn out to be quite a robust figure.

Wow! A lot has happened between photos hasn't it?

1. As per most of my models, foil was added as the bulk of the body to the central spine, defining the strong thighs and the area of the shoulders. 

2. Apoxie Sculpt was then moulded over the foil to give a near final shape to the body.

3. The sculpt of the head was then started and this was a lot of fun as it actually worked without a lot of hassle. I used large plastic, fake pearl beads for the eyes, as the hole in the bead is perfect for the iris. 

4. Once the putty had cured, I used a thin cut-off wheel in a motor tool to make a groove on the top of the skull to accommodate a plastic chicken's comb. This was covered with more putty and the wattles were added with the same stuff.

5. I wanted the wings to be a runner's arms in that they would have an" elbow" and a" wrist", both of which are important in giving drive to the athlete. I also wanted to make only one wing. This meant of course, a master and two cast duplicates. Surprise, surprise, that did not drive me to distraction with hidden pitfalls and mistakes, and they were duly done and cast. *** This reminds me why so few pics were taken. It was the wet season (up to 400mm in one day we had) and I do not like taking my camera out of its dry box in weather like that-- I've done the mouldy lens thing too much in the past thank you.***

6. The wings, being identical (as are our arms), could then be added with the curve of the feathers acting as the nicely relaxed wrist of a sprinter.

7. You can see the balsa wood support for the raised leg and this way of dealing with the various  modelling operations changed according to what needed to be done at the time. Some putty has been added to the right leg in preparation for the distinctive scaling of a chicken's leg.

 It does look a bit startled but that's to be expected, it is after all,  a Trophy Chook. That piece of white plastic used as its tongue did not last and was replaced with a sharp bit of flattened aluminium wire- so beware the sharp tongue of the chook!

Nearly there! The base was kindly donated by a local cabinet maker  as a favour to me, my teacher friend and the school. Nice bloke.
Here you can see the aforementioned support items and wouldn't you know it, a sunflower makes another appearance. This is a smaller version of the original from Plants vs Zombies, but now that I have made a mould of it, I can do a double sunflower for my grandson's collection.
The raised leg of the chook touches a point on a leaf and the strong wire stalk and with these contacts, the whole model is stable to the point of being nearly child proof. (No guarantees).

Painting. That nice timber base was massively masked with Tamiya yellow tape and standard masking tape in readiness for a white undercoat. Ha! This is where the problems began. I did not have any Citadel Skull white spray (which is superb), and I tried to do with a cheap variety. I may as well have thrown clods of white powder on it the result was so bad. In some places it stuck, in others it formed a grainy, pebbly sticky coat and in others it was just dust. The whole thing had to be sanded and that isn't easy on a complex, organic shape. 

They just don't make sanding "anythings," that can get to all the nooks and crannies that this chicken had sprouted.

A last resort was a coat of Skull white applied with the airbrush. The Citadel spray is an enamel finish which accepts the top acrylic coats really well and as I use Citadel game paints, they are, literally, made for each other.

The palette of colours for the trophy was simple and limited to, white, red,yellow and the typical sunflower colours used before. I used Red Gore then Blood Red for the comb and wattle and followed these with a coat of shiny Red ink. When this ink was sprayed with an acrylic floor polish I use for a gloss coat, it ran. The damage was limited and covered with some Vallejo glossy white, but I couldn't spray the head with the gloss and it had to be masked with a card while I finished the body and sunflower.

 

Here is the finished trophy, complete but for a final varnish coat on the wooden base. The whole thing stands about 250mm high.

I will glue a piece of green felt onto the bottom of the base. Nothing says "finished" better than a nice felt underlay.

BALL COLLECTING ZOMBIE

A quick diversion, back to the world of zombies.
I coach Junior golf, and the one thing that kids baulk at is ball collecting (at least to my satisfaction).
This in mind, I made a simple ball collector mounted on a bit of broom handle, but I needed about 10. I took the idea to an engineer friend and sounded him out as to a way of streamlining the production of the items. The talk was fruitful and I went back to making them, a little less laboriously. I needn't have bothered, for the next day he turned up with 7 already to fit into their handles!
You just can't beat a good friend!
This zombie, carrying said ball collector with a giant one on his head, is my way of saying thank you.

Poor bugger, doomed to roam the driving ranges of the dead, collecting ballzz which keep pouring out of his bag! Just as well he's got that big one on his head otherwise his BRAINZ would fall out!

 

 

The Clever Duck

While eating at one of our favourite restaurants, The Clever Duck, I asked the owner if he would like a model of his Duck to put on a shelf and generally oversee the running of his establishment for him. He agreed to my offer and hence began the saga of "the duck".
As you can see, the duck is quite a dandy, with full top hat and tails and a monocle to round off the outfit! These various elements all have to be modelled separately and well. I spent quite a bit of internet browsing to get my head around tuxedos and bow ties.

 

 

Here is another view of the duck and this was the main illustration in the restaurant. It featured the basic colour scheme required with black, white and a soft turquoise being employed. The owner was specific as to the last colour but I assured him that within the Citadel range of colours, it wouldn't be a to approach the modelling challenges that such a seemingly small and simple job can present.

 

 

Typically I do drawings in my notebooks to get an idea of how to approach each job and here are just a couple of the many pages this duck took.

 

The top hat was to be the' pinnacle' of the figure and really needed to be done well. They just look so cool! I decided to cast it so that I would have a spare top hat any time I needed one for a particularly grand zombie.

The body of the duck was handled in the same manner as most torsos, in that it was some sort of armature (duck shaped in this case) bulked out with aluminium foil and this pic shows how much foil is required to to the job. I used photos from the restaurant to size the figure and small hammers to develop the shape. It takes quite a deal of bashing to make this length of foil into a duck.

 

 

 

Here is the master of the top hat with a body of Apoxie Sculpt, a brim of sheet plastic and a band of thin lead. I made sure I had an angle on the hat so that the top was wider than the base and the block of apoxie was ground and finished on a disc sander.

 A silicon mould was made and two hats were cast. That important angle on the hat caused the single part mould to be more difficult to release as it was actually an 'undercut', and moulds like being straight or even tapered to the top. However the stuff is rubber and it released the hat in good order with a bit of  persuasion.
The second photo shows how resin can be manipulated into required shapes before it is fully cured. Top hats have a slight turn up of the brim at their sides and by inverting it with a plasticine sausage over this brim, I was able to get an acceptable form.

 The hat at this stage is solid and needed to be hollowed out with a motor tool and a lot of mess was  created.
Remember resin is nasty stuff and protection should be used (as I did). Good grief, I still sound like a teacher!
That ball of foil is the start of the head and the plastic pieces on the skewer, the base of the beak. I had lots of fun on the internet looking up things like "images of ducks' bills and feet".

The foil head against the plans.

Magic! A fully sculpted duck's head, just like that! No it didn't happen quite like that but I can't remember it being so bad either and I think it looks like a duck, so there. Now to make more of them.
The two things I really took out of this, is that ducks really do have quite large cheeks and that there is more to a duck's bill than meets the eye. There's something in that for all of us I feel.

 The eyes are stick on bead things I found in the craft section of an overflow shop. They have various sizes and can do the rivet and bolt job really well. They didn't last as the final ones, that was filled with very small teddybear eyes.

The stages of making the mould. Half burying the master in clay, building up the mould box with its registration holes and the finished product, cast in resin with the mould lines and pouring spouts still in place.

Here is a photo with a plethora of info. The sized plans in the back, the two body armatures with the important leg arrangements (necessary for a strong support onto the final base) and two cast heads plus top hat.

 

 

At the time of this build, we were experiencing our normal tropical monsoon type rain. Such weather is not conducive for a lot of things I normally do while modelling, such as photography, resin casting and painting. We had 400+ mm of rain in one night for instance, so a lot of these pics were afterthoughts and their order or progression is not as good as it should be. That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it.

This pic however does show some progress in the most frustrating part of the whole build- the clothes.
Apoxie Sculpt is not the perfect putty to try to make thin layers with. It doesn't hold at such fine thicknesses and tends to lose its adhesive qualities, making the mating of different pieces a fractious endeavour. I found the best way to thin it was between powdered sheets of baking paper and to allow the pieces already stuck on, to fully cure before trying to add any more. This made for quite a slow clothing process.

And this was before I had met the wonderful wings!

  I decided to make masters of the wings in sheet plastic, cast them and have resin wings to add to the bodies. The basic problem with this idea is that my reference was a photo of a chalk drawing on a menu board. Interpreting any 2D art to 3D has its pitfalls as I found out when I modelled Korpus Festerheart.
Here my problem was the  layering of the feathers and how thick to make the whole wing. I winged it!
The above shows the original picture, two wings made of four layers of cut plastic and tracing paper templates to get the correct mirror images of each wing.

The two off- coloured specimens on the left are made of 'cold porcelain' which I had made up from Jonni Good's blog on the internet.(This stuff is really interesting but the aforementioned climatic conditions really didn't make its use very viable. When our weather improves I hope to use the stuff, especially where I need large bulk or big surface areas to cover.) It is so cheap!

A right and left wing in sheet plastic mounted on a base ready to be  moulded.
And the results! I loved them. They came out so cleanly and I was thrill-ed. Not often does a job, previously thought of as difficult, actually come out so well. Oh yeah.

Two winged ducks, the real one on the right and the odd sod on the left. The mounting of the wings was a bit hit and miss as I was using thin super glue and that stuff waits for no man. I had also pinned the wings with two brass wire pins so that any movement would be negated but this made the mounting points critical and, sadly, the one on the left came out second best. Probably a Clown Duck in the future?

At this point the duck has acquired a coat, bow tie and waistcoat. I told you things didn't get photographed as they should, but the  coat did lead to the problem of, what was coat, what was duck and how the hell do I make those tail feathers?
Putty just won't last in thin forms and so I made the end bits with sheet plastic as per the wing feathers.

Mating such disparate materials (in type and thickness) can be a pain but it wasn't too bad here and the feathers made their appearance. Of course there are 4 on the left and 5 on the right but do you know a duck that can count?

And of course the carnation!

 

Because so much putty had been added at so many different stages, there was a lot of cleaning, scraping and smoothing to do before painting. This took a considerable time and is the most boring, but necessary job.  You never seem to get there, there's always another lump or angle or junction to fix. "Who made this rubbish?" says the finisher, the trouble is it was you and you just have to get on with it. Anyway here are the ducks, raw (above) and undercoated (below) in the spray booth. The base had been masked so that it could present any problems it had in mind, all without the benefit of paint overspray.

 

 

 

The finished Clever Duck! That tricky green colour was a mix of Citadel Sybarite Green, Space Wolves Grey and Skull White. I decided to paint the tux a dark grey as the duck is black already. The markings on the wings were never fully realised as they only appear in a B&W chalk drawing, so it was up to me as to how they would look. I know that many ducks have flashes of colour in their wings and so the third level of feathers got the shiny treatment. This was done using Vallejo's Metal Medium over the turquoise.
The monocle was made by sandwiching a punched piece of clear plastic between a loop of thin solder and the carrier loop of thin braided brass wire which was glued into a drilled hole in the shirt.
Overall I think he looks quite satisfied with his appearance and is ready to hit the duckpond and make a splash! Watch out you lady ducks!