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.)