Something Sweet for Christmas!

Once upon a time, I used to help make Christmas cakes for my company's annual holiday parties. They are too much work for the amount of cake we need, but they were still fun. They are made with fondant and modeling chocolate, and I had a lot of help (mainly with the baking!) from one of my friends. I still enjoy looking at these pics as they bring back some good memories.

Making Antony, Ant-Man's flying ant!

Inspired by Marvel's "Ant-Man" movie, I decided to make custom pony versions of Ant-Man and his steed, Antony. Although these characters have been in comic books, I chose to model the figures off of the movie versions, as seen here:

These characters are ©Marvel

This project ended up being rather complicated! Antony started life as a very shabby looking 2005 Styling Size Rainbow Dash My Little Pony, very similar to this one:

It's interesting how much Rainbow Dash has changed over the years!

One of the first big challenges was giving her six legs. Although that's not completely necessary for a custom like this (for example, I have seen many butterfly custom ponies with only four legs) I really wanted to make this pony as ant-like as possible. Since Hasbro has long stopped the production of this model, there is a finite supply of G3 Styling Sized figures in the world. Therefore, rather than chopping up another pony just for the legs, I decided to fabricate them from scratch. 

I began by drilling holes into the sides of the pony, feeding a length of coat hanger wire through the pony and securing it with epoxy. I then used aluminum foil to build up the bulk of the legs, and covered them with a skin of Smooth-On's Free Form Sculpt epoxy clay. 

The large abdomen area was done in a very similar fashion.  Free-Form Sculpt tends to slump a little when used over large areas, so I needed to sand the pony quite a bit to get a nice smooth finish on the legs. 

I like to sand outside when I can. Talk about proper ventilation!

There was also a bit of experimentation in this piece. I toyed with the idea of sculpting segments into the legs, to give it a real insect look. The effect wasn't what I had hoped for, so I ended up scratching the idea. This led to more patching and re-sanding, but experimenting is part of the fun!

The sculpted joints that I ended up taking off. 

I added pincers to the mouth and segmented antennae to the forehead, both using a similar method to the attachment for the wings, except that the antennae are removable to shipping purposes. As a cool feature, the saddle on the back has a magnet built into it that will allow Ant-Man to cling to the saddle (I will demonstrate this in a later post!) I nearly forgot to take a picture before I started painting...

Here you can see the rescultping and sanding I did on the joints of the legs.

The painting process consisted of many, many coats of thin acrylic paint. I use multiple coats to minimize brush strokes (there aren't really any) and get the smoothest possible finish. Here you can see the dark brown base coat in process:

Normally, I would have liked to have used an airbrush for this paint job. However, after moving a few years ago, I still can't find my airbrush. It was an extremely cheap Badger brush though, and I might have thrown it away in clogged frustration. Instead, I did the paint job with many, many layers of soft bristle brush blending, using combinations of black, dark brown, yellow ochre and Naples yellow.

About 3/4 of the paint job is finished in this picture.

As you can see, I chose to create the look of a segmented body using paint. I think that this is a better pony/insect hybrid look, and am pretty pleased with the finished result.

The wings are what really makes a flying ant a flying ant, and the wings for this bad boy were no easy feat! I already featured my process in this blog post. Here is a picture of the wings:

Funny observation: I modeled these wings off of actual flying ant wings.
However, in the film, it looks like they used a dragonfly wing pattern. 

In all (the sculpting, painting and wing manking) probably took 20 hours of work. It is now finished, and I will be posting a picture of the finished Antony with his Ant-Man passenger soon! Please let me know if you have any comments or questions!

Flying Ant Wings

My next My Little Pony custom is going to be Ant-Man with his flying ant "Antony." The custom is still a work in progress, but I have completed the biggest challenge of this project: creating the giant flying ant wings! It took a few tries, but I finally have a pair that will work. 

Creating the wings was a multi-step process. I decided on this method after attempting an older method I had used for fairy wings, a cellophane / trnasparency sandwich method that I used for set #1. The technique looked neat but that didn't look right for this application. 

For these, I used transparency film printed with the actual enlarged image of a flying ant's wings, then a thick gloss dimensional glue/medium on both sides, filling in the spaces between the veins. I then used the same medium to glue a length of black vinyl coated aluminum wire to the edge for stability and attachment purposes, and put a dot of black gloss "3-D" paint on the exposed end of the wire. Then I twisted the small wing and the big wing together, to make a full set of wings.

This is the dimensional glue I used. You can find it at Michael's or a similar store.
Another popular brand that you could try is Diamond Glaze.
 

The difficult part was getting the dimensional medium to self level and dry that way. The trick was to let each section of medium dry before filling in an adjoining section, as it seeks to form a solid mass and you will lose the vein effect of two adjoining areas meet (that was set #2.) The picture below illustrates how I filled in each section and let it dry (the clear parts are dry, the milky parts are just setting.)

 I put set #3 in my car to dry in the heat but oops, my dash is sloped so it pooled at the edges. Set # #4 was drying in the sun on my patio (indirect heat dramatically sped up the dry time which helps when there are so many areas to fill in and wait for before moving on.) Unfortunately, a stiff wind picked the sheet up and stuck it irreparably to my lawn chair. I was finally successful with this set when I worked on it on the patio while weighing it down with rocks! 

Here is the picture of ant wings that I used. It's actually a drawing, and I had to use photoshop to edit out the leg and dramatically darken the veins. the link for the photo (if you'd like to use it) is in the caption below the picture.

http://www.library.illinois.edu/prescons/services/ipm/images/ant_flying_2.JPG

If there are requests, I can make a more in-depth tutorial, but that is the basic process. Now, to finish the ant!

Cookie Cat Magnets!

Here are some sweet Cookie Cat magnets! These were inspired by the Cookie Cat ice cream treats that are Steven's favorite treat in Cartoon Network's popular cartoon Steven Universe.

These magnets look good enough to eat!

The magnets are lovingly hand sculpted with durable polymer clay. They are approximately 2" wide x 1.5" tall x 3/8" thick. They are three layers of ice cream cookie goodness!!! I will be bringing these along to the Vermont Comic Con, but they are also available for purchase now for interested parties.
Currently I have 8 of these, but will likely make more if there is a demand. Aren't they just the cutest? Here is the image they are based on:

If you'd like to know more please contact me in the comments, or fill out an order form here.

10 Little Kodama

One of my most recent projects has been sculpting some adorable little kodama, inspired by the tree spirits in Hayao Miyazaki's animated masterpiece Princess Monokone. Who wouldn't be inspired by these guys?

I sculpted them with a blend of Sculpey Firm, Super Sculpey and Sculpey III over an aluminum armature. Alone they stand about 3" tall, and their bases are 2"-3". I made 5 this time around, each one with two little tree spirits.

They were painted with many thin coats of acrylic paint and given a semi-gloss protective coat of PYMII. Here you can see them being painted.

They look like little aliens!

They stand on a base of heat-cured, responsibly harvested* maple logs covered with dried and treated moss. I had a lot of fun making these and plan to make more in the near future!

Kodama being sculpted!

*Regarding the logs, my Father-In-Law had a huge maple in his back yard that was severely damaged by an unfortunate fire next door. The tree was beyond saving, so he cut it down. He gave the wood to us to use as heating firewood and many, many of the branches are the perfect diameter for these little sculpts!

Groot and Rocket Custom My Little Pony (Guardians of the Galaxy)

Here is a custom My Little Pony based on Groot and Rocket from Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy!

Here is Rocket posed on Groot's back. He can be moved and repositioned.

Here is Rocket on Groot's head. 

Oh Rocket, you little rascal!

Groot was sculpted with SmoothOn's Free Form Sculpt, a two-part epoxy clay, over a G3 Styling Sized Rarity. Rocket was a McDonald's G3.5 Twilight Sparkle. His gun is an authentic Guardians of the Galaxy rocket launcher repainted for movie accurate colors.

The whole piece is painted with acrylic paint and sealed with PYM II. 

Here is an early stage sculpting pic showing how I created the wood texture. 

There are the containers of Free Form Sculpt next to figures. The whole piece measures 10.5" tall

You can see here how I painted the figure with a black base coat. I had fun with this one!

Golden Pheasant

Here is a painting that I did for a 50th "Golden" anniversary ball. The theme was "gold" so I painted a Golden Pheasant. These gorgrous birds are native to China but are also bred and kept in the US.

coutesy of https://eddietwohawks.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/golden-pheasant-2_11.jpg

I painted this rather quickly- probably in about 8-10 hours. I painted it in acrylic on canvas, then cut the canvas to fit the matt in a frame that was specific to the contest. HEre is the finished painting with some of the other pieces in the competition:

Here is is dring an early stage of completion:

And here is is *very close* to completion:

It is currently hanging in my office at work where I can't get a good completed photograph. i will take a picture and post it here as soon as I can!