Outpost 206

So this project has been sitting in my “finish eventually” pile since at least October (it’s popped up in quite a few of my What’s On My Desk updates since then), though I finally got around to finish it about a month or two back. Don’t get it twisted, I haven’t been consistently working on this project since October of last year (the end result should be proof enough of that) but something I more or less just built on a tiny bit at a time while I was working on other projects before setting aside and almost forgetting about. With that said, I started off with a cheap Batman from Mattel’s six-inch budget line of DC figures (which I think came out just prior to Mattel losing the license to Spin Master). My plan here was to create a ninja character with robot parts, heavily inspired by the look and overall design of the character Yaiba Kamikaze from the game Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z. And much like Yaiba from the game, I’m imagining by “original” character is also a ninja (as well as a cy

I know I end almost all of my project write-ups by saying something to the effect of, “I’m really happy with how this came out!” but as the glow of having finished a project fades and I start to look back, I’m not super proud of how a lot of my recent (and pretty much all of my past) projects look in retrospect. I’ll see the pics I’ve taken and think, “man, I could have spent way more time sculpting this part” or “I should have done a better job touching up the paint here and filling in the gaps over there” but I don’t let it discourage me. Because everything I don’t make for someone else (which is 99.9% of my projects so far), I just chalk it up to practice and move on to the next one. I have a never ending list of “next ones” and even if my projects look worse, I still feel like I’m getting a little bit better. I’m a firm believer in the benefits of repetition. If I eventually learn to do something well, I have to do it over and over and over again. That was my mindset when I appro

Last seen in my What’s On My Desk update from the beginning of March, I’ve had this one done for quite a while and I’ve finally gotten around to giving it a write-up. As I mentioned previously, this is a urethane resin casting of a Germanic Knight figurine from Papo. I can’t remember what style of mold I used to create my recast (if it was a two-part “clay up” mold or a one-part cut mold), just that I made it using Composimold as a test to see if Smooth-On Smoothcast resin would work with Composmold and not overheat to the point where it would warp the thermoplastic material. Thankfully, it did not (but it did leave a bunch of crusty white resin chips that was a pain to sift out, even with a wire strainer). And aside from the fact that its shield and horns/wings/whatever on its helmet broke off as I was de-molding it, this was one of my better castings using Composimold as its surface was nice and smooth. Free off all the unsightly warts, bumps, and other “artifacts” that have plagu