Wednesday 17 July 2013

Head sculpting Mk II

Learning from my first attempt I have started another 1/32 head. This time I am taking the task in phases and hopefully I have the scale nearer the mark...

My Mk I head and the new Mk II 'skull'. The new head is
slightly smaller for compatibility with my AiP soldiers.
The first phase, which you see here, is to make a featureless mannequin head. This will just be the rough shape of the skull and will be the canvas onto which I sculpt the features. At this point shape and scale are my main priorities.

With regards to scale I repeatedly compared the size of my Mk II 'skull' with one of my Armies in Plastic soldiers...

While using the AiP head as inspiration, my head will be of
my own design and will have differing features.
I am aiming at compatibility with these toy soldiers as these will be the source of the bodies onto which I will be planting my custom heads.

Again, I used the red-brown Milliput putty and I let this head dry before I start the next phase. I will now start to plan out the features on my head, nose, brow, mouth and ears - I will probably draw them on first before starting to add the putty.

The goal is a generic head, with basic features but no hair. I will add this to the duplicated resin versions to make variations in the look of the head. The other thing that I will do when I get the resin versions is to cut the top of the head off to add the various types of hats that I want.

Once the hats are added to my head I will again send them back to my brother who will cast the final version. And there you go - an original head of my own design.

One issue is that the scale of heads differs from one manufacturer of toy soldiers to another - I would have to design different heads, of different style and size, for each type of soldier I wanted to convert or personalise. Still, progress.

Next: Facial features.

No comments:

Post a Comment