Wraith Rocks
It think it might be time to make a crazy alternate Huge Ship Deaths-head Rock... Wraith style of course.
The weatherstrip is a great way to build up the skull shape I am going to sculpt. The foam putty will grab any other foam material, thus combining these products will work just fine.
Foam putty is more expensive than the weatherstrip so it is more economical to build such a large model by utilizing both of these materials.
Applying the foam putty is not unlike icing a cake. You actually smooth it on with a spatula, and push it down gently as you work it onto your base form.
The foam putty is a very good product. You can do all sorts of terrain modeling with it, but it is a little expensive.
Crazy view, just for fun. It looks like Eddie kinda...
I almost feel bad about messing up the cute girl and transforming her into the mascot of Iron Maiden!
More to come...
Fire Rocks
Hard foam is very porous and will pull the glue into itself. You need to take the time to vigorously brush undiluted glue evenly over the surface of the foam sections to insure maximum adhesion.
Now the glue needs to be allowed to dry for a full twelve hours, with a nice weight on the parts to force the glue to stay where we want it. Again, this type of foam will soak up the glue, but applied pressure will keep that reaction from messing things up.
Now that all of these sections are dried nice and hard I can carve and sculpt them without worrying about the pieces separating.
The basic shapes are done and I am ready to move on to detailing. I just used my trusty little perry knife to carve the shapes, just like I did with my Huge Asteroids. The rounded areas are pushed into shape with the large paintbrush handle. The final work was done with the screwdriver. This is where you actually sculpt in each bump and recess with the point of the driver. It is more like sculpt-carving.
The basic shapes lighted; to show the difference the sculpted detailing layer will make. We are not trying to make lamps here, we are going for a soft fiery glow from within the hot asteroid. The brightness will be toned way down with the texture and painting stages.
At this stage you could make these foam sculptures into very realistic sturdy explosion models. I am going to do this in fact as a future project. I will fully detail the explosion modeling techniques and detailing options in that forthcoming article.
Both large Fire Rocks are evenly illuminated. The trick is to keep the depth of the foam the same. If I wanted to have one dimmer say, I would have used three layers of foam rather than two. The details would be the same but you would have a full inch of extra material for the light to saturate and thus the final affect would of been a slightly larger rock with a lesser glow effect.
Now that the models are built it is time for the texture paint stage. This is not proper painting. The goal here is to fill in the much of the topmost surfaces with thick texture paint. That way the lowermost surfaces will shine and look like semi-molten rock beneath the dry hard rock surface areas of the asteroid.
I like to make my own textures because I want them to do certain specific affects by layers. You could buy a ready to use texture product, but I do not like that approach. Give me good ole tacky glue and sand any day. Be sure to use your old or cheap general hobby brushes when applying texture paint.
Now the details are starting to jump. I applied about three coats to get the rocks well covered. Notice how you can still see the remaining ink marks from when I measured the circles to cut the base shapes. That shows you that the texture paint has been mixed to stay semi-transparent. When the LED Tea-lights are under the models the glow effect that we want with these crazy asteroids will work out fine.
More to come...
PART 2
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