TLW Baby T. Rex Custom Project Part 2: Building The Nest

     Bet you thought I forgot about this project, eh?  Well, that's not the case.  Truth is, I've been pretty busy painting up items for my Etsy shop so this particular project took a bit of a backseat for awhile.  I took pictures to document the little progress I made in the meantime over the last couple of months.  Now that some time has become available, I figured it was time to post Part 2 of my The Lost World: Jurassic Park Baby Tyrannosaurus Rex custom.

      Okay, if we're making a nest of a carnivore, it would only make sense to have remnants of the poor sods who have been fed to the baby Rex, right?  Well, we had a full chicken in the freezer so we cooked that sucker up, ate as much of the meat as we could, boiled the rest of the carcass, made a soup from the broth and then I soaked the salvageable bones in a mix of water and bleach.  Crafty and delicious, what's not to like?

     The modelling putty finally arrived in the mail not too long after Part 1 so I went to work at patching up the holes I made in the Rex when I removed those third fingers.

      Much better.  It looks a little sloppy right now but when I go to prime it with Gesso, hopefully it won't be so noticeable.  Now, onto construction of the nest itself.

      Here's what I used: a plastic dog bowl, some picture wire, wire cutters and tinfoil.  Nothing terribly fancy, I was able to grab everything from the local dollar and grocery stores.

      I created a circle of wire on the inside of the bowl, cut it, tied it off and packed it in with tinfoil.  This essentially served as an anchor for building the frame of the nest.  Is it perfectly round and smooth?  No but many bird nests aren't either so I didn't think it was a problem.

      Next I poked more wire through the center piece and tied them to each other.  I made sure the wire ran under the dog bowl so that I could hook it around the plastic.  I then fed wire around the bowl on both the bottom and top, tying them off to each other and then packing it in with tinfoil.

 

    I sprayed the Rex with some Gesso to prime the surface.  I didn't use the regular Rustoleum Black Primer/Paint because this figure is made of rubber and if you use that stuff, it never really dries and cures, leaving the figure sticky and you will get the shit all over your hands/gloves whenever you handle it.  Gesso adheres a lot better to rubber without the tackiness afterwards.  Also, the modelling putty is hardly noticeable now.

    And now we have our polymer clay to put atop the tinfoil.  I just got these off of Amazon.ca and this is what I use to make display bases for figures that have a hard time standing.  Really good stuff, highly recommend it.

     For those of you that have never used it before, you can't use polymer clay right out of the packaging.  You have to work it into a softer material before you can really do anything with it.  Usually I would take two of the blocks, roll them together in my hand for a couple of minutes until it became a ball, then roll them flat.  I don't have a rolling pin to use for this so I just used this Marvel mug that the handle broke off of years ago.

    Some time later, this was the end result.  I probably didn't need to but I wound up using all of the polymer clay I had.  Using some of the sculpting tools I had available, I tried to add some texture to the clay while pressing the edges together so that it felt more like one solid mass instead of a bunch of pieces mixed together.

     Here's a test shot of the Rex in its nest with the bones placed around it.  I made sure to press hard into the clay so that there would be clear indentations of where the dinosaur and bones were to be placed afterwards.

     Now that the tinfoil has been applied to the wire and the clay has been applied to the tinfoil, it's time to bake the clay.  As you can see, the clay molding lifted right off of the plastic bowl.  To bake polymer clay, place it on a non-stick sheet (covering the sheet with tinfoil works as well) and bake it at 250 degrees Fahrenheit for 30 minutes per millimeter of thickness.  Since I didn't pay attention as to how thick I made the clay (and the fact it was like 12AM when I put this in the oven), I put it in at 250 for 45 minutes.  It seemed a little tacky and underbaked when I first took it out but it firmed up nicely overnight.

     So that's how I built the nest for this project.  I'm really liking how it is coming along so far and in Part 3, we'll be going over how to paint the Baby Rex so that he looks more like his onscreen counterpart.  Hopefully it won't take as long to get to Part 3 as it did for Part 2 but in either case, thanks for reading and if you like what you see on this blog, you be sure to nudge that "Follow" button and stay cynical!

     -The Cynic