Road To Comic Con: Adjusting The Sculpt

     Good evening, ladies and gentlemen and welcome to another entry of Coffee With The Cynic's blog.  Today we are starting our Road To Comic Con series leading up to the Brandon Comic Con hosted by C4 - Central Canada Comic Con.  The event is the weekend of September 8th and 9th at the Keystone Centre in Brandon, Manitoba.  The family and I will be there and while they're going to do a group Diablo 3 themed set, I'm not that into Diablo so I'm playing more to my strengths.  When Mattel announced the Super Colossal T. Rex toy for their Fallen Kingdom toyline, I figured that would make a great prop for the Con if it was customized into the Baby Rex from The Lost World: Jurassic Park.  So Scholar had a brilliant costume idea for me: since I have long hair, it wouldn't really make sense for me to be Ian Malcolm or Nick Van Owen, right?  Well, she suggested that I do a gender swap of Sarah Harding so that I can have long, frayed hair and won't have to shave my beard either but that's for another time.

     First, we have our main prop, the Super Colossal Rex which needs to go from this...

     ...to this.  Or at least as close to it as possible.

     As you can see, there are some things that need to be changed.  1) This toy represents the Tyrannosaurus from Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, so any scars that she may have will need to be filled in, 2) the eyeballs are way too small on this sculpt so we'll have to mold some new ones and 3) the teeth on this sculpt are just a little too big and molded together so those will have to either be filed down or removed entirely and replaced with new ones, I honestly haven't decided yet.  Thankfully, I think I know what we can use for 1 and 2.  This is all going to be trial and error so let's see how this goes.

     First off, the sculpt has some seam lines on it from being put together in the assembly line.  Some are more noticeable than others so I followed a literal rule of thumb: I ran my thumb over the seam line and if it felt like my skin was getting into the seam, it got patched up.  So I used this Tamiya modelling putty to cover those up.  This is a more liquidy than the Milliput we'll be using later and the surfaces where the seam lines sit are fairly smooth so I'm hoping that it won't be as noticeable.  So we just take this tube...

     ...and basically dab the stuff on like a bingo marker.  Then, depending on how much room I had to maneuver around on the sculpt, I used either a foam brush or a tooth pick to flatten out the putty and use any excess to continue along the seam lines.  I repeated this process over any seam lines that stood out until I had gone over the entire dinosaur.  If you're using this stuff, try not to rush but do bear in mind that this stuff dries and cures fast.  Like, not even two minutes after I had taken this picture, it was firming up.

     If anyone reading doesn't have this figure, for reasons I don't fully understand Mattel decided to have the ankles articulated.  I myself am not a fan of this feature so I patched up those lines too.

     Okay, so now that the seam lines have been puttied, we need to make sure the rule of thumb still applies.  I found when doing this that sometimes the Tamiya putty dried into pointy bits so if my thumb catches those, I gently sand down those points with the corner of a sanding block.  No need to scrub it back and forth, just a few soft strokes should do it because we don't want to accidentally sand off some of the texture of the sculpt.

     For those of you who don't know, Milliput is a two part putty epoxy that you knead together for model making, sculpting or even household repairs.  I use this stuff on the Hasbro Jurassic World figures to fill in those annoying screwholes and it works great.  So we're gonna fill in those Velociraptor/Indominus Rex scars.  Now this stuff takes a full 24 hours to cure (I'm pretty sure) so there's plenty of wiggle room just in case if I need to run some sculpting tools over it.

     Since this box was almost done, I just lumped these two parts together since we'll probably end up using this whole chunk.  Simply mix the two pieces together and knead/roll them in your hands for about five minutes or until it is one solid color.  Then I tore little pieces off, rolled them into long thing strips...

     ...and then laid them into the scars.  Once they're in, I flattened the pieces with my thumb to fill out the scar lines so that the putty doesn't stick out above the sculpt, or at least try to.  Worst case scenario, I can always sand these down later.

     Yeah, some sanding will probably be in order.  In the meantime, let's get some creases in that Milliput to match the sculpt.

     That's better.  Needs a few more but I scratched them in off camera.

     I also noticed these creases at the front of the snout.  I don't know if they're just from the fact that this sculpt is of a female Rex or of a more elderly animal (the Rex on Isla Nublar has got to be close to thirty, which is believed to be the age of the largest and best preserved T. Rex specimen, "Sue") but the infant from The Lost World doesn't really have these (at least not to this degree) so they need to be filled in too.

     So this is what's left of the Milliput and it looks to be about the right size to fit in the socket.  So what I'm going to do is turn this ball into a couple of eyeballs with eyelids and stick them into the sockets.  First, we tear a piece off and roll it flat...

     ...then cut it in half.  Now we have a set of eyelids.  Repeat with another piece of Milliput and roll the remaining ball smooth.  Cut the ball in half, put the eyelids on the top and bottom of the half balls and then stick into the eye sockets on the figure.  Make sure the eyes don't cover the ridges around the eye socket.  How does it look from the front?

     In comparison to the infant Tyrannosaur maquette?

     Alright, I'm pretty happy with how the eyes look.  Now, we can't really do much else until the Milliput cures. When I went by my desk about 12 hours later to do laundry, the Milliput was rock hard but I had a bunch of housework to do so for all intents and purposes...

     I sanded down the Milliput on the Rex just to smoothen it out.  I left a bit of texture on it just because it doesn't feel off when you run your finger on it and I didn't want to sand any of the sculpt away.

     Now for the teeth and gums.  I've decided that I am going to cut these retail model teeth out with an Exacto knife and use Milliput to not only sculpt new teeth but also a gum-line that will house the teeth.   As you can see, the teeth on this figure don't actually come out of the gums and I think we can do better.  So first, the knife and the teeth come out.

     The teeth are made of a soft, rubbery plastic so this knife cut through them like they were made of butter.

     Man, a Tyrannosaur with no teeth.  This just feels...wrong.  Let's fix this as fast as we can because it hurts.

 

     So I found two teeth of approximately the same size and stuck them together with the Tamiya putty so that this custom will have nice, rounded teeth and not flattened ones like the factory model.  Upon closer inspection, I found that the infant's teeth aren't all quite the same size, especially along the bottom jaw but this tooth will serve as a reference so we'll just wrap some Milliput around it.

      Let's see how it looks next to the Rex's head.

     I think I can work with that.  If I have to make smaller teeth, that shouldn't be too much of a problem.  Before we jump into that, we need to see just how many we need so we gotta make some gums for this guy.

     Just as a precaution, I had a couple little chunks of Milliput left over so I molded them into a couple more teeth so that my references would have some variety rather than trying to cut and paste the same tooth over and over, so to speak.

     So every Jurassic Rex has an overbite and while this does make things easier, we do still need to make sure the mouth will shut smoothly, so we'll ball up some Milliput...

     ...put some along the jawline...

     ...and test.  Voila, it closes nicely.  Now we'll fill out the rest of the gum-lines and then we can start adding our teeth.

     So here's the left over Milliput from the gum-line with the reference teeth.  I always make up too much of this stuff but at least I'll be able to put this to good use with the teeth.  So I made little indentations in the gums with the cured teeth and then sculpted new teeth with the fresh Milliput.  I would've used the three in the final sculpt but cured Milliput doesn't like to stick to fresh Milliput I've found out.  So about half an hour later of rolling bits of Milliput and sticking them to the gums...

     ...we have this.  Perhaps it isn't 100% accurate to the infant but I was on a bit of a time limit when I worked on this.  If need be, I can always try sanding down the teeth to make them more fine tipped but right now, I'm really happy with how these turned out.

     I do believe this covers any physical alterations needed to the sculpt so keep your ears to the ground for Part 2 where we'll be discussing painting the dinosaur.  As always folks, thank you so much 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

TLW Baby T. Rex Custom Project Part 3: Finishing Touches

     Good evening, ladies and gentlemen and welcome to the third and final blog entry in Coffee With The Cynic's Custom Baby T. Rex project based on The Lost World: Jurassic Park.  It's been awhile since I did one of these and I've covered a LOT of ground behind the scenes so let's get to it.

     First thing's first, once the clay has been removed from the oven and cooled, it needs to be fitted back onto the dog bowl and primed.  To fit it back on, I just used a lot of super glue on the underside of the clay and the top of the dog bowl.  Nothing terribly fancy here.  Once the primer had cured, I sprayed it with a Krylon clear coat so that the primer wouldn't feel so tacky when handling the item.

     Okay, so after applying a coat of Tan paint (mixing 1 drop of water per drop of paint or 1:1 as it'll be displayed for the rest of the blog), I noticed that the underside of the bowl had some gaps between the plastic and the clay.  I had some Milliput 2 part epoxy handy so I focused on filling in those gaps.

     Much better.  I let the Milliput cure for 24 hours and then once that was finished, I added another coat of 1:1 Tan paint.  The Tan didn't seem like enough though so I mixed 1:1 Cinnamon Brown and Raw Umber, then mixed that with a 1:5 paint/water ratio and applied it all over the Tan.
 

     Better.  Now, onto the bones!

     The lighting is different in this picture because I had to bring up the nest from my work station downstairs so that I could use the previous pictures I had taken of the nest on the computer to make sure I put the bones in the right spot.  I think I got most of them right.  I just used super glue to hold these guys in place.  Again, nothing super fancy.

     So now that we have the bones down where they need to be, we're going to add some dirt on top of the mud.  I had a bowl of dirt that I scooped up from a construction site in town a couple years back hiding away so I grabbed our cullender and sifted through what I had... 

    ...and voila.  Nice fine dirt to sprinkle onto the nest.

     So now we have to get the nest ready for the dirt.  What I did was grab an old plastic bristle brush as well as some glue.  This is the kind of glue that you have to let it get sticky first before you can do anything with it so I just ran some onto the nest...

     ...and then brushed the stuff around before it got too tacky and gummed up the bristles.  After letting it sit for a few minutes, I sprinkled the dirt all around...

     ...and now we have dirt on our nest.

     While walking with my kids the other day and talking about this project, we noticed a lot of dry vegetation laying about from all the snow finally melting away.  My son suggested that I put twigs and leaves and whatnot onto the nest for further decoration.  Honestly, pretty solid idea so I brushed on some more of that tacky glue, sprinkled on leaves and twigs...

     ...and this was the end result.  Some of the bigger pieces I used regular super glue to fasten them in place but most of the vegetation is sticking on because of the tacky stuff.  The color of the mud and dirt didn't look quite right to me so I mixed 1:1:1:1 of Caramel Candy, Raw Umber, Burnt Umber and Cinnamon Brown, mixed that 1:4 with water and dabbed it over the exposed soil area.

     Honestly, it doesn't look like much of a difference in the pictures but in hand, it did add a bit more personality to the piece.  I did end up having to add a drop of Black paint to the mix just to darken it up enough but here we are.  Although speaking of personality, those bones are looking a little too plain, don't you think?

 

     If this is a Tyrannosaurus Rex nest, those bones laying about should be bloody.  Not super crimson, fresh bloody.  No, I wanted to give the bones a more dried blood look, like the bones have been in this nest for quite some time.  So I mixed 1:1:2 Cinnamon Brown, Burnt Umber and Deep Red, then mixed that 1:4 with water...

 

     ...and dabbed it onto the bones.  Now, onto the Baby Rex!

     Okay, I know that in Part 2, I said that I was going to go over how to paint the Baby Rex but I got caught up doing another figure with the same color scheme for the Etsy store that I did this one at the same time.  Sorry about that, guys.  However, if you want to see a speed run video of how to do this color scheme, I've included Ted Brother's video on how he did his Juvenile Tyrannosaurus Rex figure from The Lost World.  I tried to follow this video as closely as I possibly could and I've learned so much from watching his stuff.

     If the video goes a little too fast for you, I will be repeating this color scheme on my Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom Super Colossal Tyrannosaurus Rex figure for an upcoming convention and I will be doing a step by step walkthrough on how I do it (so excited to work on that one).

     And there is the finished project (with a couple of works in progress in the background).  I did not glue the Baby Rex down as I figured that any potential buyers may want to take out and hold the dinosaur for closer inspection.  I'm pretty happy overall with how this project turned out and if you are interested in maybe purchasing this item, it is now for sale here.

     So the Baby Rex nest project is finally complete.  Let me know down in the comments what you think of this or if there are any other repaint schemes you'd like to see me document and tackle as I will be working on more figures for the Etsy store.  As always folks, thank you so much 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