Liz bust - painting #04 - still painting...

Here's the reason I wanted to have and make fire girl Liz Sherman's bust.

Randy Bowen sculpted and released his Abe Sapien mini bust at the end of the last century, I got it years later from Ebay. He also made Hellboy bust of similar size, but I don't like it that much, so I don't have it. (I'd love to have his big Hellboy-with-tentacles statue though, it's still one of the coolest Hellboy sculpts, but it's not very economically practical idea to try to hunt one down from Ebay, now, after two movies.)

I really liked the composition and idea of Abe bust, the cylindrical stone base with fish motive. It looked like this idea could work for other Hellboy characters too... Like professor Trevor Bruttenholm with books and cryptic symbols... I wanted to have another similar bust, to display them together, probably on two sides of some bigger Hellboy statue or bust. Of course there wasn't any available, so - why not to try to make one myself?...

And here I am, finally painting it. The whole sculpting was a long learning trip, so if I'd start again today, I'd made some details different. Like the head - when I realized that it should always be tilted on every statue and not look stright ahead, it was too late - I had cool hair and when changing the position of the head I should've sculpt totally new hair. They looked too good to destroy. So, here I am, with the little bit wooden mini bust...

Next time I'll be smarter.

Liz bust - painting #03 - painting...

Now to painting! Finally! When I started this Sunday afternoon I was hoping to maybe finish stony base part of the bust. But, as it turned out, I painted some more!...

Base - as I already wrote, I started with black base coat. The whole stone texture is painted with only white. First some layers of liquid paint, to make it more gray than black and to make it not that uniformly one color. And then more layers of white, with literally "dry brush", with minimal amount of paint. This method is a real brush killer... But it brings out all the textures better than any other method.

And then to Liz character. I started with "burnt umber", painted the whole statue brown (over the black). I really liked the look it had then, like some sort of very dark patina. But, of course, then came all the other colors and "destroyed" this cool artsy look.


First detail to REALLY paint was leather jacket, used some 3-4 different colors for it. Haven't seen it in daylight yet, but it turned out very nice! Leather looks like the jacket I have... :) Some metallic paints for buckle and rivets and it looks even better!

Not much to wrote of the later... made skin, basic eyes, basic eyebrows, cross, t-shirt, all of them will need some more work. The most frustrating thing is - when painting with microscopic brush and the hand slips and then there's some wrong paint in a very wrong spot and some swearing in the air. I like the swearing part, but I hate the other one.

Anyway, I hope this Winsor & Newton's Art Masking Fluid I have still works, so I can mask the face and jacket with it and can start to paint hair! There is NO hair on those photos, just dark brown paint. I'll try to use several browns, reds and oranges for it. Liz is not brunette!

Liz bust - painting #02 - base coat

Here's Liz bust painted black with acrylics. I'm not an experienced painter of kits and statues, far from it. Also I don't have a compressor (I still have an old airbrush), so all my painting is brushes, paint washes and dry brushing. I tried different ways, but it looks to me that the best way for me to paint is to start with dark base coat.

I first thought that this time I should paint the "stone base" part of the bust black and "figure" part dark brown, just to make later life a little bit easier. But turned out acrylics I have act very differently. Russian black paint makes a very-very thin layer when dry, it's matte and brings out the details and clean-up imperfections. The statue will look pretty cool, like covered with dull black dust. But brown French Louvre acrylics... This brown started to peel from primer and was too thick. Strangely, when I was washing it of with running tap water and toothbrush it came off like rubbery film and most all of the Russian black paint was still there. Weird.

Anyway, I painted it all black and started from there...

Liz bust - painting #01 - primer

Here's a copy of Liz Sherman bust, spray paintd with white primer. Painting process started!

Liz bust - moulding and casting #10

Here it is - second resin copy I'll try to paint on next days...

Liz bust - moulding #09

First test casting with some stones in resin. (I mixed a little bit less resin than needed, so I just sunk some stones there.)

Liz bust - moulding #08

Liz bust - moulding #07

Liz bust's mould right after opening...

(There is neat optical illusion on the next photo - look at the face in the mould!)

...and after some quick clean-up:

Actually, there were some annoying bubbles, but I tried to fix/fill them with some silicone and a needle.

Liz bust - moulding #06

Here it is - silicone cube with Liz bust somewhere inside it, cured and removed from the Lego shell... The question is - can I open it? Was there enough vaseline, so the mould will open without using a knife?

Liz bust - moulding #05

Second side is curing... Now I just need to wait and hope there was enough vaseline, so the mould will pop open when ready and I don't have just a block of silicone with statue in it...

Ca 1/3 of the mould is recycled silicone from older moulds, cut to small cubes. On my similar older moulds I used cardboard inside the Legos for better sealing, but not this time. The cracks between the Lego blocks don't leak that much, but I bet that the cleaning will be pain.

Liz bust - moulding #04

First layer of silicone for the second side.

Liz bust - moulding #03

First side of the mould is ready.

Liz bust - moulding #02

It's hard to get air bubbles out from the silicone without pressure/vacuum tank and a compressor. But it doesn't really matter if there are some small bubbles in silicone. If the surface touching the original statue and later the casting material is bubble free, then the castings will be okay.

To ensure that, it's a good idea not to pour all the silicone at once, but at first mix just a small amount of it and to brush the statue's surface with a thin film of silicone. This layer will get to all the cracks and cavities and cover the statue with smooth uniform silicone layer. Small air bubbles will not get trapped to the deeper corners of the statue's textures and details, but they will surface and pop. It's good idea to help it with air blower.

When this layer is hard, it's easy to pour in all the other silicone and to recycle older silicone mould pieces as a filler.

I didn't invent the idea of using Legos in mould making. But it works and it's actually a pretty good trick! Here's my Liz statue with one side of it in "plastiliin" (look at the earlier picture in part 1) and other covered with silicone. Big part of it is not the freshly mixed silicone, but small cubes, cut from older moulds.

In some 18 hours it should be hard, then I will open it, clean up the other side, cover silicone with vaseline to keep mould sides separate and start making the other side. Again - first just the thin film of silicone, the same way as on the first side. Then all the other silicone. On the next day the mould will be finished and is ready for casting first resin test copies.

Liz bust - moulding #01

It's 1:45 a.m. here and I'm gonna mix some silicone. It's simple enough statue, so the mould will be a simple box mould with two sides. I included some punching tools on the photo, used them to make those syncro-elements. One channel at the bottom of the bust is for air and another for resin.

Liz bust - still tweaking the hair

After some valid criticism from fellow Hellboy fan, I took another look of the bust. I removed sticky silicone layer ( as I already started moulding...), made some complicated clean-up and removed the front part of the hair from the hot-from-oven statue. (Hot clay is soft and bendable.) Then I mixed some yellow, red and green Cernit to make somehow darker mix and tried to make new hair.

New part is more coherent with the the other hair and really is much better (again!) than the previous version. It's not baked on the photo, but will be soon. Is it ready now? I don't know.

Liz bust - then and now

Image file from November 17, 2005...

...from December 18, 2005...

...and from January 30, 2010.

I refuse posting any more work-in-progress images, as they look really awful.

One can see how white Cernit turns gradually darker with multiple bakings... Yes, hair were white too. Face is made from another type of Cernit - opaque white, so it looks different.

I'll try to make some plaster copies, they should be perfect for this kind of photos. But for this I need moulds.

Liz bust - new cross

Hellboy's Liz bust ready?

(Another image)

...er... no, I will change the cross.

Liz bust and lamp

When I was in Barnes & Noble in NY, I bought something supposedly meant for reading - small "flex neck" lamp with two LED lights. Not for books, but for getting some hands free light when messing inside computer. Turns out it's quite useful for sculpting!

Ambient light is not very good when sculpting in small size, as it's the shadows what show the details and textures. When working on symmetry it's even harder to get even light, for example, on both sides of the face. And when the light is not symmetrical, it's very hard to see how different are the cheeks or are the eyelids on the same level. With this spotlight it's much easier to check those details.

***

About the bust - it's still w.i.p., trying to get the face symmetry right, her left side is more or less there by now.

And this weird thing on her head - it is supposed to look like flames. Not sure I'll use it, but when I first made this bust, I tried to make separate "flame hat" to go with it. Translucent resin is too smelly and toxic, so I don't think I will try it, but maybe I'll make something like this from usual white Smooth-On resin.

Liz bust - no face

Okay, I promised myself that on 2010 I will finish one statue per month. Although I already have one made in January (hamster), I took my old and dusty Liz Sherman bust (I started to get similar bust to Bowen's Abe Sapien) and removed the old face - it just didn't work on any level.

The bust itself looks still pretty decent. I'll try to see, can I attach a better face to it. Better than I could've done year or two ago... Updates, as always, whan I have something to show. (Like someone cares... :-) Here I am, talking/writing to myself... )