I am a sculptor. I know this shouldn't
shock any of you as one of my very first blog posts years ago was
about my first 1:6th scale figure... I've just started on another
direction here recently, a massive drop in scale down to somewhere
between 25mm to 32mm scale figures (as measured from toe to the top
of the head, or toe to eyeball; depending on the sculptor and/or
figure manufacturer). My photos are from making some dollies (what
you call a very small scale figure armature) I made using a tutorial
by Jason Miller on Matakishi's Tea House (http://www.matakishi.com/).
I've been following Jason's sculpting work on Deviant Art for some
time now taking mental notes and planning my start up. Obviously I
had to have a stable place to set up and that wasn't happening for
some time from 2011 onward as my family began our move from Alaska
down to Nebraska starting in 2011... Yup, it took THAT long, almost
three years to finally have real art space again (and even now its a
bit, well, temporary as we are just renting a house...).
My workbench is a piece of 3/4” MDF
board that measures about 3' by 5' across set up on some extra tall
saw horses I made using brackets and 2x4's I cut myself, its a
standing work bench, but when I sit in my pneumatic stool, it puts
the surface at just below eye level allowing me to rest my elbows on
it and work. Will this help? We shall see...
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| Everything I used today... |
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| Dollies pre-solder. |
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| How to avoid burns with the soldering iron... |
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| About the right proportion, soldered... |
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| A torso added with Green Stuff |
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| The bench with the works in progress, and inspirational figures... |
I pulled out about six corks I had in
my sculpting tools along with some 24 ga. Copper wire and good ol'
rosin core 60/40 electronic solder. I followed along with Miller's
Lesson 1 and proceeded to build some dollies for figures pretty much
following the designs he had to a letter with one exception. Instead
of using a bit of green stuff to hold my twist together I soldered at
that joint. Why? Well why waste green stuff on that? I'd rather
solder it at this point, and in fact if it were a larger figure I'd
use a cheaper epoxy for that part underneath anyway as Citadel green
stuff is over $10 USD for .7oz/20g worth... Its running neck and
neck with the street value of some illegal drugs being run by violent
cartels (and with the way GW is with creatively interpreting IP and
going ofter anyone who sells their product and posts pictures of it
on their online store, or sells left over parts, or creates fan art
one wonders if GW isn't their own cartel...).
Some notes on that epoxy price...
Citadel Green Stuff in Omaha NE is about $10 USD for .7oz/20g
J-B Weld SteelStik in Omaha NE is about $9 USD for 2oz/57g (granted its not going to get the fine details, but I have used it for holding my armatures for larger figures in 1:6th and 1:12th scales...) with Locktite and other comparable brands being close in price for the same size.
A search on Amazon yielded some fruitful results for other model grade sculpting epoxy compounds:
Gale Force 9's version of Green Stuff is about $22 USD for 4.5oz/130g
Not too shabby GF9! However, the winner overall for product quality and value has to be Magic Sculp with a close second being Apoxie Sculpt... Both of which I have used extensively in the past before moving forced me to give away the remainder of these fine products.
Apoxie Sculpt can be found in 1 lbs and 4 lbs weights for $12 and $33 USD respectively (sorry no metric conversions here on these, its late!)
Magic Sculp can be found in 1 lbs and 5 lbs(!!!!!) for $16.50 (okay, Apoxie wins in the 1 lbs weight class) and $33.50 USD (here we have the 5 lbs class title at only about $2 more for a whole pound extra).
Difference between green stuff and the Apoxie/Magic stuff is going to be the manner in which you work. Green stuff is going to give you a more immediate satisfaction for working time, and therefore its pretty nice in that regard as its hard and sculpt ready moment you mix it. My experience with Apoxie taught me the value of patience, I couldn't sculpt with it for almost an hour as it needed that time to set up a bit. This is a severe disadvantage in my current stay-at-home dad mode with kids teaching me that Chaos is the natural state of the universe... Magic Sculp was workable in about 10 to 15 after mixing if I recall, and I greatly appreciated that its labeled as 'resin' and 'hardener' instead of just 'A' and 'B'. Both are superior products, equal to green stuff/Kneadatite in their own way, and value wise blowing green stuff out of the water completely.
