Iguanodon, the scientist

This is a print by my daughter and just shows that strange things do run in my family. I saw it it, loved it and was given it as a present -lovely girl. I decided to return the favour and make a 3-D model of it for her.

After making a strong wire armature, it was filled with a bulking material -in this, and many other cases, aluminium foil. You can use pretty well anything to do this bulking job, but the stuff needs to be light, workable and dense when complete. I have used newspaper with a class of students as foil has some expense associated with large purchases  and really all you are doing is filling a space which will never be seen. The advantage foil has, is that it can be compressed and I use a small hammer to bash it into position ,where it is usually hot glued to itself.

The material I used for this build was Super Sculpey, a polymer clay, used for jewellery, doll making and general small scale sculpting. It is a very controllable medium and will take fine surface detail, but it requires a heating stage to make it hard. I have found that it can be too old and the white Sculpey I tried to use here was definitely past its used by date. It was crumbly and although the liquid softener recommended was used, I had to buy some new stuff  - not cheap, Sculpey.

New pink stuff to the rescue and the modelling continued.

Now this Iguanodon is no dummy - in fact, he is a CSIRO scientist, along with the duck on the piano - (another and much older story altogether). He therefore needs a lab coat, but with those Hadrosaurian thighs, I was really pushing to cover him with constant splitting of the material, which as you see is the rubbish white  stuff. 

Every good scientist needs a work station and this is probably my favourite part of modelling. I really like creating machines from plastic or things I have been given or have collected.

When I asked my daughter about colours, she said to keep it very flat and green, in keeping with the cartoony theme, so that saved me a lot of work by not having to shade and layer it.

A closeup of his noble head -who could possibly say that dinosaurs were dumb?          

 

Every good model deserves a decent base and this one got a mesh screen panelled, double layered and fully wired doozy, and there it sits awaiting the inevitable "What the hell is that?"

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Araby Ogre bust



THIS ENTRY IS BEING REDONE AS I MANAGED TO DELETE 748 PHOTOS FROM ALL MY BLOGS, NOW YOU CAN UNDERSTAND THE OGRE INTEREST.



 

One of the things I would like to see in the Warhammer world is their models at a decent size. I realise for gaming purposes the models need to be small but I am not a gamer. The only alternative is to make a larger version of my favourite one myself. The Ogre Kingdoms Araby ogre has always appealed to me, maybe because you rarely see it in White Dwarf and I like the combination of the turban, skulls and gutplate. The muted colour scheme is also to my taste.



I had to start with a standard WH ogre. I photographed him from all angles then printed these views to an appropriate size. These would be my template against which the sculpt was measured.     

 

Here is the armature matched to the template photo.       

This is the start of the blocking in process using aluminium foil and a glue gun. I have found that  foil doesn't  always want to stay where you put it , so the glue fixes it . The picture also shows the Apoxie Sculpt which will be used in the main build as well as my personal 28mm model holder made from a pin vice attached to the ball joint arm of a handy hold.

Here the model is having its first skin added, using Ferropre (mentioned in the entry on the trilobite) and you can see by the size of the cans that one purchase will last a lot of models. At this point I had added the gut plate in Apoxie, cutting it in half as befits a bust.        

Now the real work begins, getting that handsome ogre face.                 

Close up he's no oil painting- but there's something wrong with the eyes. I think I had tried to use 
 small balls of the Apoxie(cured quickly in the turbo oven), but they were unsuccessful so I had to try something else.                          

 

If in doubt, use lead sinkers! These were definite enough to allow the building of the eyelids, which, allied to the brows, give the face its character.

 

Here the main body work continues with the gut plate removed so that the chest area can have its coating of chainmail.




 

Wow! A lot has happened in one photo.The chain mail was made from basically sewing thin solder
  onto itself  - daisy chaining it along a line of loops then back again. There was a pattern to this but it rapidly degenerated to, loop, loop, somewhere, through there and then squash it all flat and make it fit this bloke's belly.The gut plate was decorated with split lead sinkers, a sword made from laminated styrene  with a lead foil wrapped hilt and quite a few skulls were manufactured - the model needed 12. At this time I hadn't learned how to cast in resin, so I had a little production line for skull making - at least this gave me practice and a choice of different sizes. I didn't realise, but there is the multiple jig on the left of the picture. Horns! The ogre grew some balsa horns and a spiked helmet. I always treat furry balsa with a coat of super glue after any grooving or sanding.



Add a turban and a few skulls and a real transformation occurs. The ogre's back build didn't get much of a look in here but a scabbard and a few dangling skulls were added. That turban with its passengers caused a bit of trouble and I really had to see the way it was layered. I originally was going to wrap a single piece of Apoxie, as per real turbans, but had to resort to "build it as you see it"". This meant if a ridge appears in a certain position, that's where you put yours. 

In all his glory. The base is two 1/16 scale Dragon figure bases which were always stacked together and looked better that way. 'Araby Ogre', is made from lead sheet hammered flat  - there are those friends again  - engineers, plumbers, farmers etc. The paint job is oils, as this medium is easiest to blend over large smooth areas such as the flesh.

Finally a pic of the back. The sword is removable for ease of transport and posed some problems as to how it was going to be held, but two great big horns took care of that. The leather jerkin and loop join to the front chain mail to complete the model. 

 Height  210mm     Width  145mm      Depth  130mm    Weight  790g       A whopper!