Artist of the week: Plastic Addict's 15" spawn statue! UPDATED with more customs!

[Plastic Addict]

First of all I gotta say this Artist of the Week thing is a great idea and it's cool to have a chance to show off the work we're proud of.

To get started I'll tell you a little about what led up to this project: When I started visiting the Spawn.com messageboards in mid 2000, I had just bought my first Spawn figure (Arsenal of Doom fishtank) and I was pumped about getting into the hobby of figure collecting. It wasn't long before Sculpey, Chaserfan and some other dudes introduced me to customizing figs and I bought my first pound of super sculpey. After that I kinda got hooked on resculpting and painting things, but I've never been hugely prolific because I like to take my time and do things right. Customizing figs is great, but I wanted to try something in a bigger scale, which allows for more detail and is a lot more fun to paint. I've also always been a bigger fan of sculpt than articulation, so model kits are a natural progression for me. I still collect figs, but over the last year or so garage kits have become my biggest passion.

One thing that always pissed me off was that there are no really cool model kits or statues of Spawn in his modern costume. I've thought of trying my own sculpt for a long time now, but since I have no training, sculpting quality human anatomy is still out of my range. I got the idea to do a 'kit conversion' about a year ago, where I would select a model kit of a different character that had a body and pose that suited what I wanted to do with Spawn, and then resculpt it to make it look like everyone's favorite hell warrior. I selected Horizon's Venom vinyl model kit for the conversion, mainly because the only thing I would have to get rid of was the head and the spider logo, and then I could go to town. He also has a magnificent musculature. Here's a pic of the original, unpainted model:



I first partially built up the original kit and attached it to a wooden base, and then hacked off most of the head:



After that I began sculpting on the first Spawn parts. All of the resculpting for this project was done with "Aves apoxie sculpt", which is a two-part clay that when mixed together cures to a ROCK hard material in a couple of hours. This stuff doesn't sculpt as well as super sculpey, but it sticks incredibly well to any surface, is about a hundred times more durable than hard sculpey, and I basically couldn't have done this thing without this stuff. It's awesome. There is also a product called "magic sculp" which is basically the same thing which I also highly recommend. In the next picture I have filled in the spider logo with bondo spot putty, and sculpted the leg pouches, left arm bands, and I've started the boot. I built up the bulk of the boot with tinfoil to save clay, and then sculpted the basic shape. The best way to get smooth, machined looking parts is to make the basic shape with wet clay, and then wait for it to harden and then carve, file and sand the piece like you would a piece of soapstone. I then add another layer of fresh clay over this and sculpt the surface details:



Here are some closeup shots of the inprogress boot and right arm. In order to sculpt the big 'thingie' on his right arm, I had to cut the arm into three sections and then rebuild it when I was finished. In that shot you can also see a piece of S17 Spawn's arm that I was using as a reference, which will give you an idea of the scale difference. I had about a half dozen different spawn figures on my work bench along with several pages of the comic book on my corkboard to use as reference while I was working:



<font color="#cd6600"><font size="1">[ February 29, 2004 09:04 PM: Message edited by: Plastic Addict ]</font></font>

<font color="#cd6600" size="1">[ March 05, 2004 09:31 PM: Message edited by: Plastic Addict ]</font>

[Plastic Addict]

I then sculpted the head. I tried to leave as much of the original Venom head as possible, to save me some work. For example, the 'brow furrows' that make him look more pissed off are from the original:



After the main body was done, I had to decide how to do one of the hardest parts, which was making a cape. I considered leaving the cape off, but I thought it would look half-assed without one. I started by rolling out a big sheet of Aves between a piece of saranwrap and a piece of tinfoil. I then draped this over the shoulders with the foil facing out, and then used masking tape to 'pose' the cape so it would look dynamic and not cover up too much of the figure:



One of the problems with doing a cape is that I would somehow have to remove it so I could paint Spawn's back and the backside of the cape itself. By leaving on the saranwrap, I could just remove the sheet of clay once it was hard, and then add more small sheets to make it bigger:



<font color="#cd6600" size="1">[ February 29, 2004 08:57 PM: Message edited by: Plastic Addict ]</font>

[Plastic Addict]

The problem at this point was that the cape looked far too small, but I also didn't want it to be so big that it covered up the main figure. I decide to make it look like it was extremely folded and scrunched up to create the illusion of size instead. I added the folds to the cape by using dozens of 'snakes' of supersculpey which I then blended together to give it that appearance of flowing material:



The next problem was that this looked too smooth and unnatural, so I had to give it a gritty, cloth-like texture. I did this by using a product called 'Liquitex modeling paste', which is an acrylic gel medium that dries very hard. I applied it to the entire cape with a nasty old crusty paintbrush, which left very prominent brush strokes that resembled the cloth texture I wanted. This was way easier than spending hours carving lines into the sculpey, and looked much better:



When the main figure was sanded and ready to go, I then sculpted the base to look like some kind of violent and bizarre hellscape. I made the stalagmites around the edge slightly curved to make it look almost like teeth so that he sort of appears to be standing in some kind of big mouth. I also added human bones to the base by buying a skilcraft 'visible man' model kit, and then making several resin castings of the skull. I carved apart the skulls and stuck them in various positions on the base, and then added some of the other bones as well like a rib cage and a few arm and leg bones. When this was done I primed the figure and the cape with Tamiya fine surface primer for plastic and metal:



As for painting, I started with a base coat of black, and then painted the red parts with a mixture of delta ceramcoat 'barn red', and Americana 'crimson red':



<font color="#cd6600" size="1">[ February 29, 2004 09:00 PM: Message edited by: Plastic Addict ]</font>

[Plastic Addict]

[Plastic Addict]

I then painted the 'M' with a very light gray color, and the eyes with a mixture of Apple Barrel 'neon green', and Delta Ceramcoat 'yellow'. I then added shading to the red sections with some washes of black watercolor paint, and then I shaded the 'M' and the face with black chalk pastel dust. I painted the base with Delta Ceramcoat 'burnt umber', and then gave it several washes of various watercolors, and then drybrushed some DC 'slate grey' over the whole thing. The skulls are painted with a basecoat of DC 'Ivory', and then several washes of burnt umber.

The chains were made with plasic chain made for bird toys, which I spray painted with Krylon 'original chrome'. I made them appear to be 'alive' by freezing them in place with superglue and a 'cyanoacrylate accelerant' which makes superglue dry instantly. I then reinforced the chain by adding a drop of 12-minute epoxy glue to each link which makes them much stronger. The skulls on the cape are resin castings I made of the skull that came with "throne spawn" from the Alternate Realities line. the skull on the belt was actually something I found on a keychain that came with a bottle of "Blair's After Death" hotsause! I added fangs to it by glueing the ends of some thumbtacks to the teeth. When I was done I sprayed the whole thing with Testor's Dullcote sealant (VERY important to seal the paint when you're done), and I made spawn's eyes appear wet and 'necroplasm-ish' by painting them with Future acrylic floor-polish which is made for linoleum floors, but also works great as a gloss finish for customs and model kits.

So, without further ado here are the finished, painted pictures!:

[Plastic Addict]

[Plastic Addict]

Hope you guys dig it! I spent a fuckload of time on this and I think it turned out great. from the bottom of the base to the top of his cape he's about 15 inches tall

[sculpey]

That is just fucking beautiful !!!!!!!!!!!!!

[EndQuest]

[virtualNYC]

Originally posted by sculpey:
That is just fucking beautiful !!!!!!!!!!!!!

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">couldn't have said it any better myself [img]eek.gif[/img]