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Painting
Tartan Plaid
I recently had occasion to build and paint the Celtic Vampire (see photos) from Warriors, and I thought I'd pass along my solution to painting the tartan plaid on his cloak. I basecoated the cloak in dark red, then airbrushed an even darker maroon into the folds for definition. Then I bought a calligraphy pen (an Itoya Doubleheader) from the local art supply store. This pen is basically a felt-tip with a flat, chisel-shaped tip. I carefully drew the thick and thin lines on the cloak one section at a time. Don't worry if the ink goes on unevenly: you're really just using the control of the pen to make straight stripes. Then paint over the stripes with a brush, keeping within the borders created by the calligraphy pen.
The Celtic Vampire and his plaid cloak If you're bold like me, use tube watercolor (the color I selected was Lamp Black) and after it dries you can sharpen the edges of the lines with a clean brush dipped in water. Just don't touch the lines with your fingers! After your lines are perfect, spray a couple of light coats of Testor's Dullcote to seal the watercolors, let dry and proceed to the next section. I painted the entire tartan cloak in four or five hours with this technique--much faster than I would have been able to by brush alone. Blending Acrylic Paints with a Brush How do you achieve a smooth, blended transition in tone with your acrylic paints in a tight spot you can't reach with your airbrush (or what if you don't have an airbrush at all?) There's a technique for this, which is to blend the acrylics with a wet-on-wet technique similar to oil paints. The trick is, you have to be A) prepared, and B) fast with the brush (since acrylics dry so fast). Get some Liquitex retarder (a medium you add to acrylics to slow down the drying time a bit) and add a bit to your base tone. Then take some of the retarded paint (I couldn't resist) and mix in your highlight or shadow color. Then, quickly paint your base tone where it needs to be, then, with the same brush, dip into your shadow or highlight and apply it, creating a hard boundary up against your base tone. Now you can quickly blend/feather the two tones of paint together with your brush. You might need to add more base tone or highlight/shadow to either side to make for a smooth transition in tone. If you work fast in a small area, you should get a smooth, blended transition between the tones. If you're really fast, you can mix a shadow, a midtone/base tone and a highlight all at once and blend from one all the way over to the other with a single brush. As always, practice makes perfect. Puttying Joints with Sculpey III A variety of putties are available for filling seams and pinholes in resin and vinyl kits, but I'd like to suggest a product called Sculpey III. This is a polymer clay used to sculpt the prototypes for resin and vinyl kits, and it has an extremely fine grain, even finer than the fine grade of Milliput. Plus, since it's formulated for sculpting, it holds detail like no other filler material, which makes it ideal for resculpting detail over wide joints and on vinyl models that have been reposed. Sculpey III, sold in 3-ounce packages at craft stores and art supply stores, remains soft indefinitely, and can be hardened by application of heat from a heat gun. Heat it on medium or high, fanning the heat-stream over the joint so as not to overheat it. When the Sculpey loses its glossy appearance, let it cool, and then heat it through one more time. If you have an adjustable heat gun, use the "8" setting. Once cooled, the sculpey can be sanded, primed and painted with normal model paints. Most figure kit modelers are familiar with cyanoacrylate glue, commonly known as superglue. It's the glue of choice for these kits, but did you know there are various thicknesses? The thin stuff is great for filling pinholes and cracks, as it will flow into gaps via capillary action. For general use, try a thicker, medium-grade cyanoacrylate, which isn't as drippy as the thin stuff. You may have seen those spray bottles of "kicker." Kicker is a miracle liquid which causes cyanoacrylate to set up instantly. But using the sprayer is inaccurate and wasteful. I bought a big refill bottle of kicker and put a little into a squeeze bottle with a needle outlet (you can get these at many hobby stores). With this squeeze bottle you have absolute control over how much kicker you apply (a drop at a time) and where you apply it, so you won't be wasting the product by spraying too much. You also save a lot of money compared to buying the small spray bottles. Vinyl kits are very popular due to their affordable prices and the fact that they can be easily reposed. But vinyl can be sensitive to temperature. The warmer it is where you live, the more the vinyl kit will want to deform, particularly around stress points like ankles and knees. In southern climates, even in an air-conditioned house or apartment, vinyl can get warm enough to sag slowly over time. Kits like the new Geometric Alien and Pumpkinhead II: the Metamorphosis, with their thin legs, are really susceptible to a bad case of "the leans" later on. The best way to fight this is with a little advance planning. You can create an internal armature to help support your vinyl kit using uncoated copper or aluminum wire: run the wire up through the legs, from the base to an internal anchor spot. The second best way to fight gravity is by filling the kit. Most kit manufacturers recommend using plaster of paris, but a better alternative is expanding polyfoam, such as Mountains in Minutes, a two-part product that foams up and expands to many times its original size. Don't use the foam from those spray cans at the hardware store, as that foam generates heat that can deform your kit as it expands. When using Mountains in Minutes (available at model railroad hobby shops), make sure to cut a vent hole in an inconspicuous place like the sole of the foot (to let trapped air escape), and wrap a rim of aluminum foil around the opening you'll pour the foam mixture into. You don't want to get this sticky foam on the outside of the model. It's important to note that a little MiM goes a LONG way. It's better to mix it in very small amounts and add more if you need it. Mix up a small amount of the foaming agent according to instructions and pour it into the kit. It will foam up and solidify in a short time, providing a rigid internal structure for your kit. Be sure to provide for any overspill that may occur. Combining a wire armature with foam is the ultimate in supporting your kit, and is my preferred method. You can also use wadded up pieces of newspaper as a lower cost alternative. Make sure the newspaper is dry, and force it into crevices and crannies with a bit of wooden doweling or a chopstick. You'll be amazed at how much compressed newsprint your model will hold. Again, a combination of wire armature and newspaper filler will work best. Creating Realistic Scaly Hide with Paint Conventional wisdom, when it comes to painting the scaly hide of a creature like the Kothoga from the movie The Relic, is to use dark washes and light drybrushed highlights. But you might want to take the opposite approach. Why? Well, if you look closely at a lot of creatures that come out of the various creature shops in Hollywood (like Stan Winston Studios, who did the full-size Kothoga), you'll see that a lot of the scale textures consist of dark scales against a lighter background. This is modeled after real creatures like alligators and crocodiles, which have dark plates and scales mounted on lighter skin.
Note the lighter skin and dark scales on Stan Winston's Kothoga To achieve this effect, establish a lighter base tone for your creature's skin (for the Kothoga I chose orange and yellow). Then paint on a darker color over the scaly areas (I chose burnt umber). After the dark color is dry, thin down your lighter skin color and apply it as a wash. The lighter color will collect in the cracks and crevices between the scales. You want the wash to be fairly thin so that it will not overpower the dark scale color. The wash will always dry darker than it goes on wet, so don't be alarmed if the color in the cracks is pretty dramatic. In fact, you may have to wash the area two or three times to get the right effect (I use a blowdryer to dry the washes in just a few seconds). When you're done, you should have very realistic looking dark scales that look like they're mounted on a lighter skin beneath. Resist the urge to do any drybrushing afterward, as you want the effect to remain subtle. When done properly, this creates a very realistic skin/scale effect. |
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