Floaking, Reaper LE Sci-fi Sophie diorama base

Hi everyone. It seems that Yotsubato is bringing in a lot of traffic to my blog, so here's she again. Say hi Yotsubato.

I think all the modeling of the base is very much done, so it's time to put some finishing touches to it.  To make the rocks look natural, it's time for flocking.  I noticed in real life that grass grows better from bigger gaps or cracks between the rocks.  When unattended, smaller plants instead of grasses will grow too.  To recreate that I put white glue between the cracks and then sprinkle these fabrics down there.

Next I used these ready-for-use small stubs of flowers and tall grass on the flatter area of the rocks.  I imagine that before the land slide they would have been growing grass, so I would imagine the grass will keep on growing.

Here are some close up shots of the grass and the flowers, beautiful isn't it.

As good as these grasses are, I still have to trim them so that they look less like they are just bursting out of flat ground in a fan shape.

Later on I'd post some better shots of the set up, and there's Yotsubato, complaining that there are still no miniature on the base after about 10 entries....

"Where are the miniatures??"

Reaper LE Sci-fi Sophie diorama base WIP 4

Yep we are still working on the base because when I finish painting Sophie I will lost interest and the base will look horrible.  And yes, Yosubato is making another appearance, although she seems busy with the ferret.

The idea is that I need to fit the miniature in place BEFORE it got painted.  One hard lesson that I learn from doing dioramas.  It comes with a small base so that its foot and tail have somewhere to sit on.  I did my best in cutting and chipping away the metal base and made it as small as possible.  Then I chipped a hole on the 'rock' and try to fit it in, and used green stuff to fill in the gap around it.  Because the rock is actually clay it doesn't really stick to the green stuff too much.  I managed to wiggle it off the rock pretty easily.

(It just occur to me that I need to pin it to the base when it is done else it will fall out of place.)

I got a small lump of green stuff left after I fixed up the base for the ferret, so I used them to smooth over the cutting marks on the structures.

As it turns out it looks quite nice and smooth.  Good thing about green stuff is that it won't shrink a lot, unlike putty.  Because it felt a bit like hard rubber I can actually scrape on it to create a smoother surface.

I always thought of replacing her wings with another more futuristic wings like the one in the picture.  But as it turns out it isn't such a good idea because the wings (taken from SD Gundum) is too "cartoonish". Plus, the diorama has a lot of  nature elements to it so I guess her original wings would fit better.  It costed me US$5 to buy the SD Gundum and it's pretty costly just for that pair of wings.  Oh well.

Originally I thought of adding a pin to the tip of the wing but it seems pretty hard and she would get too high off ground.  Instead I placed two pins to the back of the tip.  It took a bit of very careful drilling and I almost drilled through to the other side with the upper one.  It created a small bubble on the front and I had to send it away.  I am very surprised the brass rod could actually hold her up, but I guess at the end I would have to glue the wing to the structure.

I am pleased at the result, the whole point is to make her look like she is flying.  But personally I would always look for the connection point, the part where the model is connected and suspended.  Because it is connected in a less conventional way it would be less obvious to the viewer, so I hoped.

So to make the structure looks more damaged and blended in with the whole setting, I will do a lot of weathering to it.  I had never did salting before so probably I had wasted a bit of pigments here.  What I did is I used Secret Weapon wash as the suspension medium and added a lot of pigments to the mix.  It looks very good actually but I haven't let got a good shot at it yet.  The thing is, because I will be doing salting, a lot of the pigment will be lost in the process.  So I could have simply just painted it brown instead of using pigments... but I guess I want to see how it looks like if I use medium and pigments.  Oh well.

Until next entry, thanks for reading.

Making boulders with paper clay 2/2 - Reaper Sci-fi Sophie diorama WIP

So before I put Sophie there I think Yotsubato would be the main attraction these entries.

"Hi everyone!"

So here it is, I put a big piece of cardboard as background so that my paint rack won't confuse everyone.

To add more texture to the rocks I used a carving knife to chip away the smoother and rounder surfaces of the balls of clays, so it looks less like rabbit poo ;).  The 'mud' dried out very nicely, I guess by accident I found a way to more evenly and randomly apply sand to an area.

I first air brushed the recess and gaps and holes and cracks between the balls of clay with dark blue.  I did the same for the edge so that it looks more like an edge and it helps with directing focus to the middle of the setting.  I haven't done a great job with the mix for the highlights but as it turns out, the mix was just right for the structure.

The mixture was a white + light blue + brown.  I air brushed the whole structure trying to show the different layers of the base and giving it more dramatic lighting.  I guess I might need to do more air brushing with the structure, but I guess I'd do some weathering first.  Also I need to do quite a bit of base coating to cover up places where it used to stick to the plastic frame.

[[[ for closer to finish looks of the boulders, please visit: http://51-cent.blogspot.hk/search/label/sci-fi%20sophie  ]]]


Here's a shot of the back of the structure.  Next up, the ferret.