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!

 

 

 

 

 

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.