Cartoon Wednesday

 

Hippo Distraction - Day 7 Finished

 This morning I touched up some of the black lines as well as adding a couple more. I tried to even out the yellow on the tassels. I would probably fuss with these some more but I have to consider drying time at this point. What that means is I’ll have to depend on my brother to apply the gloss coat in a couple of weeks in California. Now I just need to arrange delivery to Louisville before they leave next Monday.

Hippo Distraction - Day 6

More details and beginning the touchups at this point. The yellow tassels are driving me a bit crazy, I forgot how difficult yellow is to work with. Harry is basically finished at this point so about an hour for the next session should wrap him up. The saddle has a lot more fade to it, much like the original but the light is really killing that for some reason. I may revisit that and lighten the upper surface of the saddle even further.

Hippo Distraction - Day 4 & 5

Moving on to the details. The tongue and the saddle blanket in this case. Since I needed some of the paint to dry before I could paint other things this took a couple of days. This is the stage when I start mixing enamel and oil paints together. The base for the red is magenta enamel while the red itself is cadmium red. The blue base is a mix of Prussian Blue and White enamel with both full strength Prussian Blue enamel and Pthalo Blue oil mixed in. The process gives a very rich vibrant color. In between the red and the blue will be white and I was thinking of free handing some stars into the blue but we will see how that goes.

Hippo Distraction Day 3

The hippo has been named, he is now Hieronymus "Harry" Hippopotamus or just Harry Hippo for short.

Progress continues, the blue shadows have been blended into the base gray. Its not perfect but its good.

Hippo Distraction - Day 2

Day 2 saw the Hippo (whom my wife is now calling Hieronymus or Harry for short) receiving the initial base coat of paint. This work is done with a combination of oils and enamel paint (yes, I know those are both technically oils). Major work is done with enamel paints and then I add oil paint for additional color and detail work. By combining these two types of oils I can the ability to blend colors because of the lengthened drying time but that drying time is also shortened. Basically it will take days to dry rather than weeks to dry.

This initial coat is just gray, about 5/8ths black and 3/8ths white. Initially applied with a 1 1/2" house brush and then stippled, with a weird triangular brush I found at the store, to remove the brush marks.

Cartoon Wednesday

 

Hippo Distraction - Day 1

I was the recipient of a recent curve ball from my brother. He and his wife have accepted new jobs in southern California. They sold their house but don't have a place to actually move to yet. In the long run it means that he can't take the Patriot carousel horse with him (they are decidedly difficult to move in perfect conditions and this one was damaged the last time it was moved. There is enough damage that I'm still trying to figure out how I'm going to fix it). He is insisting that he "needs" to have one of my dad's carvings and it "needs" to be the hippo and he is going to be quite upset if he doesn't get to take it, right now. Nothing like a little family drama. It had occurred to me that I could ship him to California but he weighs about 70# and probably needs a crate to insure a safe delivery and as I said all carousel animals still are bit fragile (typically legs that are extended, in this case its the extended nose). I fairly certain that I could pack him well enough to survive but in the end its probably easier to make my brother pack him up with everything else.

Much to my wife's dismay I have elected to get moving on the hippo and let him take it. I needed to paint it anyway so I figured this at the very least gets me moving on it and it gets it out of the workshop. Its a nice piece and has the added bonus that its relatively small and not as detailed as the rooster (which is still staring at me, belligerently, demanding to be finished as well). Its to cold in the workshop to paint it there so he has been brought indoors and is sitting in the dining room to be painted. And it has to be done by next Tuesday. That's kind of a longshot from a dry paint standpoint but we will see.

The hippo is quite nose heavy and someone but a 5 year old on its back who promptly rocked on it which caused it to fall forward and take quite the hit on its nose. Only the hippo was damaged in the accident, fortunately. This is after the repairs were finished. Anything in white was fixed. What you can't see is all the repair work in the mouth. The mouth is actually hinged and moves and that entire assembly took the brunt of the tip. The problem with that is the lower jaw moves on a metal rod that is embedded inside and can't be removed. Fixing it was not fun. I didn't do that work. When I started looking at it over the weekend though I saw that the back of the mouth was not glued properly and was loose so I figured out how to get some clamps in there and re-glued it. Still it was a pretty darn good repair job in the end.

One of the issues with the hippo was that I had a bad tube (well old and expired) of titanium white which I went ahead and used anyway (another story there). The skin ended up with a pebbly texture when it was done. Since he was going to be repainted and needed sanding anyway I went ahead and sanded away that texture.

Then it was on to the priming. I didn't need to prime the while thing since I was going over old paint but I seemed to have gotten carried away with it and did more than I really needed to.

Here is the Patriot horse which my brother currently has. Any horse with a flag is called a patriot and white is the traditional color. This particular pose is a "stander" she has three legs on the ground (some will have all four legs down. And yes, this is a she. Most carousel horses are and there is a way to tell, its not what you think).

Painting the HO ScaleHumans - Skintones

I went back to try and find the ScaleHumans on Shapeways because I forgot to bookmark it. Shapeways drives me crazy. ScaleHumans is the name of sculptor's shop on Shapeways. That's the easiest way to get to his stuff (Shops/scalehumans). If you are trying to look for him as the designer you need his name, not the shop. The sculptor is Richard Kapuaala (designer/rkapuaala) and that gets you to his bio on Shapeways and you can get to his shop from there as well.

Back to the painting. I finished up the fleshtones on these. I, of course, went a bit to wide with my last skin tone and had to dial it back with a glaze of my dark skintone (Burnt Red Brown, A.MIG-0134). Then it was back to the main highlight (applied a bit more carefully this time) and followed that with one more higher just to emphasis some of the facial features.

The facial details on these is a bit better than the ones from Modelu. That little bit of exaggeration by the sculptor goes a long way to be able to make the details pop.

Skintones:

Burnt Red Brown - A.MIG-0134

Red Leather - A.MIG-0133 

Burnt Sand - A.MIG-0118

Cartoon Wednesday

 

Painting the HO ScaleHumans - Detail Wash

After some relatively intensive training over the last week and a half I have finally found my way back to the workbench.

I'm back to the HO scale group from ScaleHumans on Shapeways. I only had time to do the basic wash to bring out the details on these. This really made the detail pop, but it also emphasized the printing lines on them as well. You can definitely see the difference between the Tan Fine Detail plastic and the Clear Ultra Fine Detail plastic. When I order again I'm definitely going with the Clear Ultra Fine.

Like with previous work this initial thin wash is done with Reaper Miniatures' Brown Liner. Because I do two thin washes I use Vallejo Airbrush thinner to thin it out instead of water.

These seated engineers are all printed in Ultra

.

Pretty sure this one is in tan

These three are all done in tan plastic

This is a mix. The two on the left are in tan the two on the right are in ultra

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Cartoon Wednesday

 

Painting the HO ScaleHumans - Priming

The Holidays are over and I finally have some time to get back to the workbench. I'm going to start the year off working on the HO scale prints from ScaleHumans (available on Shapeways). I had prepped both the HO and O scale versions a couple of weeks ago so its time to get down to business with a little primer.

Once more to the airbrush booth with Badger Stynylrez grey primer. Nothing special here, thinned the primer a little bit set the psi to 10.

Here are the results:

They look pretty good at this stage, but I am concerned about what look like printing artifacts/rough patches and a general fuzziness to some of the prints. I'm going to go ahead and get some paint on these and see how they look after that first wash. Otherwise I may be experimenting to see how I can finish them better for painting. I had selected a tan for one set (which I shouldn't have been able to) and ultra for the other set. They are easy to tell apart, the ultra ones are visibly smaller and I don't know if that's because of the material they are printed in. The only way to know for sure would be to order the other set in ultra and see what happens.

I love this conductor. Unfortunately I won't be able to use him on the Warehouse Row layout, wrong era. Everyone else is generic enough to pass for the late 50s without a problem.