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.
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.
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!
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!
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