Random Resin Recasts and Slapchop Painting

Whenever I’m pouring a silicone mold, I almost always have a spare “dump” mold to catch any excess silicone rubber that I mix up so that nothing goes to waste. Usually, these dump molds are of a miniature figurine and, more often than not, these mini figure molds also serve as a dumping ground for any excess resin when I’m casting something else. And over the course of this year, I’ve accumulated quite the stockpile of recasted figures and had no real plans for what to do with them aside from vague notions of using them to practice my painting skills. Then I decided that it was time to revive my dormant Random Resin Recasts series, only this time around, I think I’m going to focus on whatever I plan to do with these resin duplicates rather than the casting process itself.

For these six particular castings, I want to try out a method of miniature painting (though the 5” scale Marx gunslinger figurine is certainly no miniature) that I heard about on youtube. I’m talking about none other than the Slap Chop method. I don’t know why it’s called that, but it appealed to me because it makes use of contrast paints, which I’ve been trying to find a use for since I’d purchased a number of Citadel brand contrast paints late last year and earlier this year and haven’t really had much of an opportunity to play around with. I should probably note here for those in the know that these Citadel contrast paints are the older formula, as they were purchased prior to the release of Games Workshop’s Contrast 2.0 line.

As for what these individual castings are duplicates of, I’ll get into that later.

As the videos on the method would suggest, Slap Chop consists of the following basic steps:

1. Prime in black.
2. Drybrush in gray.
3. Drybrush in white.
4. Paint with contrast paints (or Army Painter Speedpaints or Vallejo Xpress Color)
5. Pick out and paint small details with normal/non-contrast hobby paint.

And here are the castings primed in black. I used Rustoleum flat black after first giving the miniatures a coat of Bulldog adhesion promoter since the type of rigid urethane resin that I used to cast all of these (except for the tiny caveman, who was cast in epoxy resin) isn’t the most receptive to paint.

Then I drybrushed everything in gray. The tutorials suggest a light gray, and I didn’t really have one at the time, so I just mixed a few drops of Vallejo white paint in with Citadel Mechanicus Standard Gray. For this step and the next one, I focused my dry brushing on the areas where light might naturally fall upon the object and tried to avoid drybrushing paint on the areas where it wouldn’t (under the arms, between the legs, etc).

Then I applied the next layer of drybrushing using Vallejo Arctic White brush-on primer. I couldn’t help but thinking that if I stopped here, this would make for a pretty cool and easy way to paint something to look monochromatic or like a pen and ink style drawing. But that’s not what we’re trying to do here.

My range of contrast paints are severely limited and for the most part, I wanted to stick with them for the majority of this exercise. So don’t expect a ton of variations in colors, since at the time of this exercise, I only had a red, a blue, a yellow, a flesh tone, a brown, a gray, and a green (and a bottle of contrast medium). Though as I started painting the flesh tone on the cowboy and the caveman, I noticed that it was way too dark (like a shoe leather brown). So I dry brushed on a little bit of Vallejo Sunny Skintone paint to lighten up the skin and give it a more natural look, which I think worked out great. I also found out that contrast paints, or at least the ones that I’d picked out, don’t necessary mix well with one another though I was able to mix up a decent enough orange and light green for the Toxie and a satisfying reddish brown for the tiny Baragon and the cowboy’s shirt.

And because the Slap Chop method was devised to emphasize speed, I decided to paint all six castings at once. I was quite impressed with how I was able to paint all six figures in what seemed like half the time it would take me to paint one figure using my traditional method (prime, basecoat, wash, drybrush, clearcoat). Though admittedly, a lot of this was down to the limited color palette and the fact that I didn’t really want to spend a ton of time on these things as again, these are just excess resin castings and this whole thing is just meant to be an exercise in Slap Chop painting for my own edification and amusement.

Now onto the end results…

After painting the last of the minute details (eyes, random accoutrements, etc.) with regular, non-contrast hobby paints, I hit everything with a protective clearcoat and snapped side-by-side pics with the original toys these castings were duplicated from on the left and my painted resin castings on the right.

This tiny Baragon (one of the more underappreciated classic Toho kaiju, in my opinion) is a miniature sofubi/soft vinyl figure that I picked up on eBay. This was one of many resin recasts that I’ve made of this guy. Due to my mild colorblindness, I wasn’t really sure what color to paint him. In the “Frankenstein Conquers the World” movie, he just looked brown to me though I’ve seen him described by fans and on fan wikis as being red or reddish brown. So I just mixed some Citadel Blood Angels Red with Citadel Gore-Grunta Fur (brown) and hoped for the best. Not that I was going for any kind of screen accuracy here. Afterwards, I went in with some white to paint his horn and went over that with some Citadel Tesseract Glow.

The miniature pictured here is one I’ve mentioned before and even made a half-hearted attempt to turn into a bootleg MOTU-style 5” scale action figure, though I’ve since decided to put that project on the backburner as that project would require much more extensive work and a simple head sculpt on my existing MOTU-style buck body. It is, of course, the Blaster of the Universe from the 90’s Monsters in My Pocket toyline. Particularly, Blaster here is from their Aliens In My Pocket series at a time when Matchbox started to transition the line away from being one, solid color keshi (soft rubbery plastic) figures to a harder plastic with paint apps.

There were three different color variations of Blaster, a neon green, a blue, and the one that I own (again, pictured on the left) in lime green. Since I had a pretty nice looking sapphire blue contrast paint (Citadel Talassar Blue), I decided that blue was the base color I wanted to go with. Though much like the Gulliman Flesh skintone on the other miniatures, Talassar Blue ended up looking a lot darker than I wanted it to, so I had to cheat again and dry brush some lighter Vallejo Electric Blue over some of the high points to brighten things up a bit. For his guns, I gave it a thin coat of Reaper Polished Silver and while that isn’t a contrast paint either, it’s thin enough to be somewhat close.

At the time, I didn’t have any black contrast paints (though I’ve since purchased a bottle of Army Painter Grim Black Speedpaint) so I just painted the air, loincloth, boots, etc. in solid Citadel Abbadon Black and called it done.

I have no idea what this caveman came from, just that I found it in the attic above the garage at my family’s place and his painted casting didn’t turn out all that great. This particular casting was made out of cheap epoxy resin rather than the urethane resin that I used for all the other castings in this set. There wasn’t much detail in the sculpt for the contrast paints to really grab onto and this wasn’t the best casting, so I knew early on that this would be something of a dud and spent even less time on it than I did for all the other ones (which wasn't much to begin with).

Up next we have the recast of the Louis Marx gunslinger figurine from the 50’s or 60’s paired side by side with the original toy in light red. I made a couple resin duplicates of this very figure and they were among the first things that I’ve ever pressure casted. One of them, I customized to look like the Lone Ranger. This one, I didn’t have a particular color scheme in mind given my lack variety in contrast paints, so I just went with reds, blues, and browns. As I mentioned previously, the Guilliman’s Flesh paint that I used for the skin was too dark for what I wanted so I dry brushed it with some Sunny Skintone. I painted some details with Citadel Runelord Brass, like the band of his hat, his belt buckle, and his gun (as well as the bullets on the back of his belt, which I didn’t take a picture of here). I might have also drybrused on some Citadel The Fang over his jeans, but it probably didn’t need it since the white and gray undercoats did most of the highlighting work already.

I didn’t do much for the base that he’s standing on. I think I just gave it an Agrax Earthshade wash shortly before applying the protective matte clearcoat.

This next figure is Captain Payback from the S.L.U.G.Zombies line that Jakks Pacific put out in 2012. I don’t remember where I got this guy, though if I had to guess, he was either in an ebay lot or a Goodwill grab bag. I like him because he looks like Snake Plissken if he randomly showed as a character in Metal Slug. I also like M.U.S.C.L.E. inspired keshi figures in general and I still plan on making some of my own in the very near future.

Like all the other figures in this set, I kept his paint scheme relatively simple. Green contrast paint for his fatigues, Basilicanum Grey for his RPG, and the same Gulliman’s flesh basecoat with a Sunny Skintone drybrush. I also drybrushed some silver or gunmetal over his bandolier and parts of his RPG.

I really like this is a Super7 M.U.S.C.L.E. figure of Toxie and I was especially pleased with how the painted recast turned out. As mentioned before, I mixed some of the green contrast paint with yellow for his skin and the red contrast paint with the yellow for the orange of his shirt and boots. I think out of all of them, this one and Captain Payback turned out the best.

Overall, this was a fun little exercise even if I didn’t have a ton of time to spend on these. I definitely want to try to Slap Chop painting method again with some of my other recasts even though I’m not in a huge hurry to run out and buy more contrast paints, though I do have my eye on that Army Painter Speed Paints starter kit and might grab it if I can get a good enough deal.