View Askew NewsBites™

March 5th @ 5:48 pm | No Comments » | Scooped by Will Wilkins, Dave Stevens & Traci Briery

  • You can find some photos taken from Kevin’s DVD signing appearace at Dave’s Video last weekend HERE. As always, the turnout was huge!
  • Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back is currently the top seller on UK DVD personal import site play.com, which is a sign that the disc is just as popular overseas as it is here. Chasing Amy and Dogma are also on their chart, as numbers 34 and 36 respectively.
  • And finally today, for the curious, here’s how that Bartelby figure we showcased yesterday was created, straight from the source:
I didn’t sculpt the head, but did embellish the chin and hair slightly of a soldier figure made by Dragon Toys. It was called “P-40 Pilot ‘Ben’,” meaning they’d made an Affleck likeness under the table, so to speak. They’ve done the same for Russell Crowe, Mel Gibson, Brad Pitt, and probably some other big stars. I like Dragon Toys, heh. Anyway, the shirt is just material from a deep red T-shirt. The pants and shoes came from one of those 12″ “Gentlemen” figures from Buffy. Those floating, grinning guys. They wore black suits and shoes.

The armor (breastplate, backplate) was sculpted in Sculpey. I just lay a thin piece over the chest and back and conformed to the “muscles” of the doll body. Discovering the hard way that Sculpey isn’t as strong as I’d like, I ended up casting the two pieces in resin. Many botched paint jobs later with chrome spraypaint, I found some bare metal foil and laid it over the pieces with little trouble.

The shoulder guards, after several botched attempts, were finally made from a super-super thin sheet of plastic, cut into the appropriate shapes and glued together in layers. I bent some sheet brass into the rounded shape and glued the plastic to that, then covered it all in bare metal foil. The chainmail is made from a nylon mesh, spraypainted chrome and just glued into place.

The wings – ah, yes, the wings. Many years ago I bought some very small socket joints. I have no idea what they’re really for, but I kept them, and ended up using 4 of them. Two to attach to the backplate and 2 to make the bend in the wings. The wings’ framework was made from those and brass tubes. I glued some fabric between them and started gluing feathers one by one to the framework until I ended up with wings. The wings were meant to be able to fold in and expand, but eventually there was too much material applied, so that’s out. But they can still be positioned because of the joints in the backplate.

Sure sounds like a ton of work, but the end result was great! See yesterday’s news for the photos.

No Comments Yet...

Scroll down and be the first!

Got Something To Say?

You must be logged in to post a comment.