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.

 

 

 

 

Ra Zombie from Plants vs Zombies

This poor photo is the standard cast zombie head with foil bulking and styrene plastic side wings that any "pharaoh" worth his salt wouldn't be seen without. I am making a" Plants vs Zombies",Egyptian  
for my grandson for Christmas, but this time am trying to utilise the existing moulds of the previous zombie efforts to duplicate the model for my own collection. I want one too.
The Ra figure is obviously Egyptian in appearance and has a spectacular headpiece with a Horus (falcon headed god) feature, as well as multi coloured mummy bindings and a sun sceptre. In the game, this zombie trudges in and with his sceptre, steals all the suns that your sunflowers have produced.

Because I wanted two of the models, I had to decide whether to make multiple masters of all the new bits or try to cast the duplicates. I chose the latter because it would be good practice at casting smaller, thinner pieces, and I had purchased this new Pinkysil Putty which is good for flat, one sided objects.
The sceptre is made up of two parts, the shaft and the sun shape. I carved a master shaft out of thick plastic sheet and with judicious drilling, sanding and filing, managed to get the tricky bent shape quite well. The sun circle was a bit of a bugger because it has 10 points and that means dividing a circle into segments of 36 degrees (not a straight forward geometric construction angle). Anyway I did it somehow even though its small size made it even trickier. The two plastic pieces were then imbedded in the putty - top photo - and on curing were filled with resin, which was put aside to cure.
The other mould and cast is the Horus 'falcon' beak which would be added to the finished helmet. This was another good use of the silicon putty. An Apoxie master beak was made and simply pushed into a blob of the soft pink stuff which was then allowed to cure, a matter of minutes only.

 

 Here we see the master head and the two casts as well as cast beaks and sceptres. The bodies are the same as previous zombies with special attention to the fitting of the' one size fits all 'legs. You can see that the casts of the sceptre shafts are surrounded by excess resin from the casting. This excess is called flash and is good to have in that you can control the finishing of the piece which is usually a sanding or filing process, without worrying if you have removed too much

 

 

The two sceptres are finished and cast in resin which makes them light but strong. All that is required now is to add a blob of Apoxie to the suns to make the raised centres.

Here is the fully cast' Ra' head which differs from the previous zombies in that it has in built eyes. I kept the eyes of the the first zombies separate so that they could be really finished smoothly and even air brushed with a gloss paint, then added at the very last minute for maximum impact. This job had so much extra detail in the head piece that I decided to fit everything at the same time. It didn't help that much and the final eyes are not as good as the first ones - a pity.
The mouth is partially hollow and requires drilling out as well as having the gums and teeth added in as before.
Where the Horus beak will go has been hollowed out to a degree to allow it to really "fit" into the helmet and not just sit on the surface.

The helmet has  its beak and some scribed eye circles as well as drilled nostrils.

 

 

Now comes the tricky bit. The hands must hold the sceptre but as the arms were cast straight they needed to be cut and realigned with elbows. A simple job using super glue and accelerator to form, not only the bond but also the filler for the joint.
The fingers were formed with sausages of putty over stubs of plastic rod fitted into drilled holes, then folded over the already in place sceptre ( it had been glued into the palm of the hand at the correct angle).
I wish I had thought of a better way of joining the sun to the shaft but at the time this seemed to do the job - I suppose it does, but it goes against the grain to cop out to such a simple junction.

Each left arm is hanging straight and so the only problem was the dreaded fingers, but the method employed was easy and looks the part.

Here is a good view of the action area, with the illustration of Ra in my notebook as well as many tools of the modeller's trade.
I must have cast a few spare legs (probably using up excess resin) and they show the flash that is caused by the resin leaking into the join between the halves of a two part mould.

Now we get to the main difference between Ra and the previous figures. Ra is mummified and so is wrapped in bandages. This photo shows the arms with their swathes of wrappings. Also in this pic you can see the centre of the sun as a raised convex disc of Apoxie Sculpt.

 

This is how I made the wrappings. A sausage of putty was gently rolled flat and the best roller I found was a plastic Evergreen tube. It worked really well because it did not squash the putty, just flattened it controllably until I was able to slip a knife blade under it and proceed to wrap the little man.
I like the slightly frayed edges of the "rag" and this added to the whole "old" idea which is what both pharaohs and zombies are all about.

The wrapping of the bodies proceeds and the frayed look is evident. At this point I was unaware of a big problem which only showed up when the time came to stand the figures up. They had such big heads that, with the angle of the feet as it was, you couldn't see their faces!
Something had to be done and I tried two methods, one for mine and the other for the grandson.

 

 

 

For mine I built a ramp so that the whole figure was tilted back without actually looking so.
The one for my grandson needed a simple flat base so the ankles had to be broken, drilled, pinned and
filled to give the correct angle for a normal zombie carriage.
I actually made a master of a flat pavement piece with a sun pattern, cast it using the Pinkysil Putty and built my ramp and his flat base with copies of the master.
This pic shows other minor details (this is quite a complex little figure). There is a small sun medallion at the throat, the gums and teeth have been added as well as two arm bands made from thin lead sheet.
The feet have had their bandages and the figures have been pinned and glued to their bases.

From this point on painting takes over. Here the figures are being undercoated in my spray booth with a cream semi gloss spray can paint. MISTAKE! The colour is alright for the subsequent light overcoats (yellows, light green-greys etc), but the type of paint actually rejected the following layers of Citadel and Vallejo acrylics I like to use.

 

 

 Masking for that tricky colour, yellow. I had decided to make his the standard yellow and orange and mine, yellow and blue. Yellow is a difficult colour to get a strong coverage and the way I do it is to airbrush thin layers with intermediate drying using a hairdryer. This builds up the layers gradually while always finishing with a smooth coating. Using a brush for whites and yellows is a sure way to drive you bonkers.

Here is that yellow(Citadel Golden Yellow) and it took quite a few sprays and dryings to build up this intensity.

The wrappings were of course three different colours - a light green grey, Slaanesh purple and  Eshin grey (I think?) A darker green grey made of a mix of Orkhide Shade and Vallejo German Camo Beige became the skin tone for both zombies.

Much masking for the Blazing Orange stripes on the side pieces of the helmet

He looks good in stripes don't you think?

 

 I like mine with the Enchanted Blue but the trickiest bit was to come. The helmet features the eyes and beak of the Egyptian god Horus and I would have liked to airbrush the blue grey facial mask which gives this figure its strength and appeal. Sad to say I couldn't find a way to mask the two sides of the face with an airbrushable transfer and so I had to do it by hand. Talk about Mister Steady Hand! It nearly beat me but those Citadel paints and a good Windsor & Newton 00 brush got me home .

The large area at the back of the head really needed something and as stripes seemed to be the in thing for zombie pharaohs, well, did I have a choice? I masked the two of them up with Tamiya yellow tape (great stuff ) and sprayed, again in thin layers, Citadel Dark Reaper. The bases were painted with a mix of browns, desert yellows and washed with Devlan Mud or its new equivalent. The armbands look good painted as if they were metallic brass still shining through the years, (Tinbitz and Auric Gold.)