ALIEN

COOKIEEESS!!

Sculpted from Super Sculpey (the pink one)

THE PROCESS

 Bulking out the armature with tin foil. To get the scale of the limbs correct the armature was measured against a reference image before mounting. I changed the pose of the alien much later than I should of  - don't ever do that, it's horrid. About now is the time to fine tune the pose...

Blocking the shape with clay - also called the form-less crap blob phase.

I jump around adding detail without rhyme or reason, I build up whatever feels best at the time...

Tin foil under the foot to stop the clay sticking to the base when it's baked...

Some more details are added here but it is still quite rough...

Some fine gauge aluminum wire was added for the extra detail...

A bit of texture is added...

Here i've changed the posture because I didn't like it - much much much too late to be altering things like that but I guess you live and learn...

 

THE HEAD

 

You'll have seen this technique elsewhere - but a good way to make sure the profiles are correct are to cut a silhouette from your reference and sculpt to that - it's very easy to see where anatomical things such as mouths, eyes and so forth should be. It's good to have a good front, side and top view to get an accurate idea of the shape.

As the shape is bulked out, small refinements are made...

After the blocking stage more details are added.

 

THE DOME

 

The alien in the first film has a translucent dome over its head - I wanted to try and replicate this..

The first thing was to make a master of the dome. I laid cling-film over the baked head sculpt and formed the dome master from Milliput. The cling-film is there to stop the Milliput binding to the head sculpt.

As the master is sculpted it is smoothed out with water (Milliput smooths really well with water) and left to harden.

If I had a vacuform machine - I'd have just made a form from my master - but I don't have one and so needed to find a different way. A mould was taken of the master and a few experiemnts with materials was made to find the best thing to use. Clear resin was out as I don't have access to vacuum or pressure casting tools so I needed something more basic.

The 1st attempt (to the right of the green master) was 5 minute clear epoxy adhesive. This was ok, very solid but had very clear bubbles. Its thickness made it difficult to spread into the mould and made it so it was hard to get an even thickness across the form.

The 2nd attempt (2nd right from green master) was hot glue.... It was worth a shot right?

And the final attempt which worked 80% ok was Deluxe Materials Making Waves. Railway and scenic peeps use it for modeling water together with some other bits. It's kind of like PVA but without the sticky.

Multiple layers were painted with a brush (note the texture) into the mold over a period of days (DAYS!, making waves takes a good few hours to dry depending on thickness)

A quick blast of dark grey around the edge was added afterwards. It's a mostly successful attempt and is sort of translucent enough - but of course better results would be gotten from clear pressure casted resins or vacuform pulls... maybe next time!

THE ALIEN

The base? It's a cooking tin and some drinking straws...

Thanks for looking...

EARTHWORM JIM

This is fairly brief as it was a quick one (about 2 weeks). The hardest bit was having to eat a Pot Noodle for it.

Before any sculpting was started, I got some reference so that I could get a good idea of the proportions for the armature. I also finalise the posture at this stage and make sure I know all the relevant sizes for things the figure may hold or sit on...

The Worm

The bulk of Jim was sculpted from super sculpey.

For some reason, I end up sculpting hands separately. For no reason what so ever.

The Jet

 For Jim's jet engine I gathered a few parts to form the interior of the jet engine. Shown here is some guttering, a sauce pan lid (left over from the build of my Greeter from Oddworld) and a bit of a Pot Noodle container. (I needed a cylinder which tapered and the container was the perfect size)

For the outer shell of the jet engine I cut up an old measuring jug of mine and sanded off the numbers to make it smooth. The parts where then painted and glossed.

For the turbine inside the engine an old 80mm PC cooling fan was used and sprayed yellow.

The detail

Earthworm Jim was painted with Vallejo Air acrylic. It took a lot... A LOT to get a consistent white finish. Accents were airbrushed with a faint light blue.

Some thin blue ribbon was then added for the detailed area.

The attitude

(I know, right?...)

HASHTAG HOLLA AT MY LED STRIP LIGHTS

Thanks for looking/reading

ADVANCE WARS TANK (+SPECIAL GUEST)

This one is was a really quick build - and so the write up is brief... I based the overall design on the tank shown here, but I added some stuff...

Some plans were drawn, which were mainly for scale - as for speed and time I changed some minor details depending on what materials I had to hand and what looked better in the moment.

  

The entire tank is built from scratch out of styrene. I had a hard time working out how to do tracks thought... Then I got lucky and found some Lego caterpillar tracks which weirdly fit perfectly - Honestly so perfectly, like, to the millimeter.

Some other pieces were taken from my box of not-want (recycled plastic). I kind of kit-bashed myself. Pieces include knees from my Slig, fuel rods from the Hunter and old favourites - ping pong balls and bits of pen.

It needed a gruff bloke sticking out of the top of it though... So who better than the solider from Team Fortress 2.

the mesh seen here is from a cheap plastic sieve, and the other rectangular shapes are buckles from an old bag I had...