After sculpting my ownself, I tried to sculpt my wife. of cours ethis is not the kind of sport where you can allow your self to fail..

So first let's put some Duro over 1mm thick brass so that further sculpting attemps can stick on something. Wife sculpting 1/35

Wife sculpting in 1/35

One leg! then 2! not the greenish colour, I now mix Duro with MS, it glues better on wire

Wife sculpting in 1/35

Now a beautiful dress

Wife sculpting in 1/35

feet and hands

Feet in 1/35

Wife sculpting in 1/35

The head! Yes I have some Hornet heads not far away when i sculpt mine. It really looks like my wife :)

Wife sculpting in 1/35

Wife sculpting in 1/35

And now some extra pictures taken on a very low light outside. Some extra trimming will be needed

Wife sculpting in 1/35 Wife sculpting in 1/35 Wife sculpting in 1/35

That's another self portrait.

JBA Diorama self portraitNow don't think I am doing those (Galilée, Sokol etc.) because I am a self obsessed git, i am doing those because those dioramas are telling about my life. Really, boats as well as history are some sort of not very important background to my dioramas, what matters is the figures and the stories they tell.

Whatever, I did that one and have a few comments to do about theb techniques involved.

First I made the mistake of assembling various bits of Dragon and Tamiya figs in the right position and then to trim them to let me apply some mastic afterwards.

That's a stupid thing to do, really the Magic Sculp doesn't hold very well to the plastic and it tends to produce too much bulky sculptures.

Anyway I did it. Afterwards I use pure Duro/Green stuff to do all the wrappings at the extremities -end of trousers, jackets etc. I try to be careful not using too much Duro because you can't sand it that well when it is cured.

JBA Diorama self portrait

then  as the Magic Sculp wasn't really holding too well, I mixed it with some Duro (I saw some totorials about that) and well, now it's a fantastic trick because the MS gets way more sticky this way!

JBA Diorama self portrait

Anyway  here is the final result. The greenest the parts the more stickiness i needed, the more Duro I mixed with Magic Sculp..

JBA Diorama self portrait

In the end the hands and ...ears are Hornet, the feet are Tamiya and the rest is me. It *does* look like me, except I granted myself a bit more hair than in reality. i can lie even more than on facebook with my own sculpting.

The grey stuff is Mr Surfacer to try and get a smoother finish when needed.. not a full success here

JBA Diorama self portrait

Oh yes, I am quite long limbed by the way :)

Now i will try and sculpt my wife, that's going to be another story!

Happy new year to all of you!  I spent some time in front of the computer lately, fixing one thing or three with that very website -notice now how I have been including 4 years worth of archives. Some of those posts are of various quality, but there are some okay tricks to be learned here and there.

Here we go with a big fortification wall. let's first do some more detailed form out of thick plastic

Big wall form

Then let's do the rest of the form out of plastic and plasticine for kids. here is another use of the hairspray I use to weather the boats :) It's of course heavily greased.

Fortification plaster wall

With the current weather, the plaster doesn't dry so fast which is a very good thing.. One of the most important tricks to remember with plaster is that *you don't sculpt the same things when the plaster is wet than when it's ultra dry*. The other one is *use different qualities of plaster*

Here is the plaster wall straight after unmoulding. plaster fortification

Of course the problem right now is that the plaster was still so fresh that most of my little bits under the corniche went when I unmoulded the form. Whatever, let's use the moments when the plastyer is still very wet to sculpt roughly all the different stones blocks, trimming here and there -and adding again the small blocks under the corniche by just applying some fresh plaster and then cutting them out with an X-Acto.

first plaster sculpt for the fortification

Notice the buring traces. i have been forgetting the wall on a very hot radiator... The plaster then gets very brittle, you carve really huge when you want to sculpt it.. all the best then.. Look at the final result -the inner bricks were done in a much better quality plaster and the drzawing of different bricks is a lot finer. the point ifs to show some walls of different ages..

You may also notice that stones are getting mroe or less scarteched on the surface, more about that later.

finished plaster walls in 1/35

Finally, may I insist about the fact that what i have just been doing is actually quite a simple job? that's not Xtreme modeling or whatever, everybody can do that.

Ah well, time to raise the level a bit :)

Neither my torpedoes nor my boat are completely finished, but then I wanted to have atry at some walls, made of stone.
Now, if there is an era of modelmaking that moved a lot since last time I built some massonnery of any kind (Brest Litovsk, 2005, another life), that's really the way the model makers build their walls ruins, whatever. Hydrocal, plastic (Miniart, let my eyes roll), cork.. well none of those ways are mine. I always believed that to reproduce an element accurately in scale you should use the same material. Metal for metal, Stone for stone. Aha that's easy being said of course. But really if I had the skill to do my boats all of metal or wood I would do them this way.

There is one thing where I feel like model makers don't have much excuses buying ready made products, it's really when it comes to ruins, walls, houses etc. Because they're freaking easy to do! We a(rte not speaking homemade photoetch here, just to put a few wooden sheet together, pour a bit of plaster and using a modeling knife.

It took me 2 hours to end up with that one below

First let's cut a bit of plastic to have some raisings in the massonery and then using some plasticine for kids to do all the borders (okay, I reckon cutting the plastic in geometric shapes can sometimes be tricky)

pouring plaster to do a wall
Notice some detergent thing for the round shape.

plaster wall in scaleLet's trim this thing once it's dry -don't wait too much because it's harder when the plaster is rock hard.

sculpting the wallHere is the process (a bit boring) to scratch all the different stones. Do that with the back of a X-Acto, something like that.

When the stones are done, don't hesitate to redo them another time, vary the amount of space between each stone, scratching them with the tip of the blade, half removing them etc.. More tricks about that soonish

Anyway, here are two views of my small bit of wall. A much bigger one next ime/

So that was some three weeks worth of "work" then, the 4 first meters of that small ship are finally completed. I have no real time to feed t-hat blog properly, so here are some of the steps I used in order to build all the accessories. few text, loads of pictures.

So this starts with homemade photoetch. I only had a few bits of brass left -and then my French online mail order is sluggish to get the stuff delivered, so I had to rely a lot on some of the leftovers from previous dioramas I carefuly store. Anyway, I could still do some of the 47 mm Hotchkiss parts as well as air intake stuff etc.

photo etch homemade

First that air intake. I hate building air intakes, this is very difficult because you have to work out a master in plastc and Magic Sculp, then you have to vacuform it (with the heat of a candle!) and then you have to join and fill the two halves..

Air intake scratchbuilt

here is a bit of soldering, those are the two supports for the side lights. I don't think i will place them on the boat because their shape somewhat hides the gun, and then I have  a reference picture where those had been removed solder

half dried Magic Sculp, evergreen tubing, breech sculpting and trimming, sanding etc, here are some parts of the Hotchkiss 47mm gun parts of the Hotchkiss 47mm gun

Hotchkiss 47mm gun completed! Hotchkiss 47mm gun

Here are all the parts done! Now it's time for gluing those parts for the 1/35 russain PT boat

And here is the thing.. I will post some better pictures showing it primed soonish!