Monday, May 03, 2010

From the Desk: Angelius Conversion Work

The Angelius is a breathtaking beast to behold, but the pose of the sculpt lacks a certain degree of action deserving of such a creature. I'm sorry, but it's true. The only time he'd be "sitting" on the ground is when he's sleeping. I wanted to do a little conversion work to better reflect this full-time flying pose. To that end I did this bit of conversion work. Despite being a relatively simple change, it took me a frightful amount of time due to my lack of conversion experience. Unfortunately I didn't take any in-progress shots, but it's pretty easy to figure out how I did it.
First I started with a wedding cake pillar from a craft store and packed it with leftover tabs removed from models and secured it with green stuff. I then attached it to one of the metal PP bases. My reasoning here was that with an increased model height, I needed to put far more weight on the base to help compensate. Next I cut out the coil piece from the body of the Angelius and put a brass rod in place to re-join the two pieces at an appropriate length and curve. Next I put in some Milliput, dremelled that down appropriately after it cured, and then refined the gaps with green stuff. The remaining work mostly amounted to filing, smoothing, and pinning the re-sculpted body piece to the pillar to secure it.

Bing bang boom, and there he is, ready to be primed. He's not exactly "epic", but he's a little more exciting than before and I'm pretty happy. One side note is that I probably should have put magnets into the base before doing the final attachment, but hey, being smart is overrated.

No comments: