First, I roll out a thin sheet of Super-Sculpey. I find a 15mm diameter ball of Super-Sculpey makes a nice strip roughly 60mm long and just a finger or so wide, only about 2-3mm thick. I make sure the strip is flat and smooth and then scribe in panel lines with my homemade tools. After 30 minutes or so of scribing, I take a box-cutter blade and carefully cut the strip into a myriad of tiny rectangles and a few odd shapes, all with sides ranging from about 1mm to 5mm. The tiny shapes then get baked at 275C for 12 minutes to make them ceramic-like, and then glued to the ends of small wooden sticks, making little clay stamps.
Next I roll out a block of sulfur-free clay (NOT polymer clay) so that it's flat. I then press out the shape of the ship itself using the little stamps I just made. I pour Alumilite Super-Plastic resin into the impression and then 10 minutes later remove the finished spaceship, making sure to use a tooth-brush to remove any clay clinging to the cast.
Here are pictures of my first two designs. I'm crossing my fingers that tomorrow I can get these painted and bring out all these wonderful panel lines.
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| Prior to sandpaper clean-up |
I seem to be batting a 1000 here in terms of messed up posts! Looks like an interesting technique but my concern would be that I would not know what the ship would turn out like as I was creating a negative image of the ship. Does that make sense?
ReplyDeleteYes Chris, that makes sense. I find one of the fun parts of this technique however, is being surprised by what pops out of the clay after I cast. It's usually pretty apparent when I'm making the impressions whether or not the design is going to look neat or pretty lame.
ReplyDeleteI was led here by your posts on the BGG site. This is very, very cool. I am interested in making some custom ships for my son's Battleship Galaxies game, and some custom tanks for Memoir 44.
ReplyDeleteDo you have the ability to make a video of the process (for ships, or tanks)? I think it would fill some gaps for me and make the process more complete.
That, or a couple hundred more photos ;-)
Thanks, either way!
I'm not able to do a video at this time, but I'm happy to answer any questions you may have. If I can answer them with more pictures, I'll put them in a new post. Thanks for looking!
DeleteThat's terrific, thank you for being open to fill in some holes for me!
ReplyDeleteI found myself getting stuck on two different things... where you "press out the shape of the ship," and fill the impression with resin are areas where I don't quite keep up. I've not made molds or worked with resin, so I have a hard time visualizing those parts of the process.
Are you making a negative "hole" lined with impressions from the "stamps" to form a ship? I am somewhat confused there.
Thank you again! These are inspiring.
Yes, that's exactly what I'm doing... I'll dig around on my computer and see if I have a shot of an impression mold and if not, I'll take one and put it in my next post which I planned for today, updating my progress on the tanks. Thanks again for the kind words; I hope you can use these ideas to make minis for your son. It really is a simple technique, which requires little skill, just costs time and money.
DeleteThanks for the info. I make 54mm nativity sets and 25mm fantasy figures out of lead and was looking for a way to make toy spaceships so I can make molds since no one sells molds for this. Thanks again for the info.
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