Magic Sculp
Wife sculpting | dim, 01/22/2012 - 22:41
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.
One leg! then 2! not the greenish colour, I now mix Duro with MS, it glues better on wire
Now a beautiful dress
feet and hands
The head! Yes I have some Hornet heads not far away when i sculpt mine. It really looks like my wife :)
And now some extra pictures taken on a very low light outside. Some extra trimming will be needed
Sculpting JBADiorama | lun, 01/09/2012 - 18:33
That's another self portrait.
Now 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.
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!
Anyway here is the final result. The greenest the parts the more stickiness i needed, the more Duro I mixed with Magic Sculp..
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
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!
The Russian 1905 PT boat is completed | lun, 12/12/2011 - 12:08
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.
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..
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
half dried Magic Sculp, evergreen tubing, breech sculpting and trimming, sanding etc, here are some parts of the Hotchkiss 47mm gun
Hotchkiss 47mm gun completed!
Here are all the parts done! Now it's time for gluing those
And here is the thing.. I will post some better pictures showing it primed soonish!
A Russian PT Boat scratchbuilding (the start) | mer, 11/30/2011 - 11:00
Hard to realize but I had some sort of diorama burnout right after SMC Eindhoven. I had to work way too much just prior to the event, and certainly needed the rest.
Whatever, after this kind of things I usually ned to get back to the basis. Why not scratchbuilding (again) a Russian 1900 ear PT boat?
So i found that very special one built in Finland (then a part of Russia) in order for the navy to place them on battleships like the Orel or the cruiser Retzivan (that I already modelled on the Tsushima diorama).
I needed as always a lot of reference to get started and I thank my friends Kronma and Cerberus JF to have filled me with great reference.
As alsways it started by drawing the cross sectiopns of the ship on a graphic software, printing them down to paper..
Then I glew those on some 1mm plastic card and proceeded to cut them, and assemble them like I show below.
hey, notice something. i went a bit fast here! What about the turret on the lower left of the picture? now that was the difficul part..
first notice that i hollowed the top of the boat so that i can place that turret afterwards.
Then what I did is that I put a small sheet of paper in place and managed to draw the shape of the final turret that way :
Of course I neede tons of adjustements and tricly finger placing before getting that. Notice the crosses which are the position of the portholes.
Then I glued that bit of paper on some plastic and cut the shape out, and used my (great) Czech punch and die to hollow the portholes
Then I assembled everything, trying to leave the less gaps possible, glued everything in place with some Tenax like glue, and added a roof with Magic Sculp covered plastic sheet.
Okay, I don't feel like I make it plain here; but such a work is twofolds -really it is ultra fast as all the plastic work was done in less than 2 hours, but then it was a really tricky work to do because what you must look after is leaving the less gap possible when you assemble the turret and you must get the shape right which I *mostly* did.
You still noticed that there is a big Tenax trace on the turret with some embedded fingerprints that is going to be hard to correct with Mr Surfacer.
Oh well..
Whitehead Torpedoes (part 1) | mar, 11/08/2011 - 18:54
One good thing when being around for a bit of time is that you get great help when asking for some very precise stuff. So here is a gentleman that scanned me some very old plans for Whitehead Torpedoes as they were built in Fiume -ex Austria Hungary. Well thanks once more because they're almost finished by now, and reasonably accurate.
The first thing I had to do was to cut some aluminium and brass tubes at the right dimension using this kind of plan
Then actually cut the tubes. i filled them with Green Stuff so that every element would be at the center of it's parent.
Let's cover those assemblings with Magic Sculp, wait for a few days and then sand until the shape is perfect. Now those early torpedoes look so much better than later types.
Time to sort of draw some lines all around the tail of the torpedo, so to do that, I embed it in my Punch and Die set and turn the shape until I have some sort of line all around.
