Back from the dead

I mentioned ages ago that I had snapped part of a model in half and thrown away the pieces in a fit of rage. More specifically I snapped the largest piece of the model in half. Eventually I purchased the model again, and after a couple of false starts managed to cast a usable replica of the broken piece. It's severely inferior to the original, but since the original was mainly ragged cloth the cast was passable (with a little work) - had the broken piece been something less forgiving, like a piece of armor, the poor quality would have been more visible.

 Let me clarify I'm not making replicas of models, I'm certainly not selling copied bits, I just repaired one part of a model that I had legitimately purchased. Hell, I had to buy another one that I would not otherwise have bought just to repair the first, so it worked out quite well for GW.

In the photo below you will see several different colours of material used. The original grey plastic parts, the greenstuff/milliput mix I cast the replacement part from (in theory it should be less brittle than pure milliput but stronger than pure greenstuff), some bits of the original greenstuff mold that were imbedded in the cast piece, and pure milliput I used for gap filling. There's also some white grains from a water filter I used to replace the studs on his cowl that didn't get cast clearly, and some pure milliput I used to fill the annoying dimple on the base and generally give it a smoother finish.

You can see in those photos where I had to fix the cowl with pure milliput after it broke just above the base. I installed a pin inside first in order to strengthen it.


After finally putting it all together again, I primed it white then used a very quick simple paint scheme that luckily turned out decent.

The cape is just dark green with drybrushes of lighter greens up to a very light drybrush of white, then given a generous green wash. The hood is dark brown with snakebite leather edge highlighting (in general I don't like edge highlighting for non-solid materials, but it just seems to look better with it than without it). The scythe was basecoated in brown, then stippled orange, then a careful boltgun drybrush along the edges was complemented with some boltgun stippling, then some boltgun feathering along the cutting edge (this came out less fine than I had intended but I couldn't be bothered to try to fix it). All studs were just dwarf bronze.

The staff was initially painted grey then streaked with graveyard earth, but the results were too light so I used darker streaks of brown, then there was far too much difference between the grey and brown, so I tried to colour it with washes. In the end it turned out far too dark, I had been aiming for an "old bleached wood" look and just couldn't get it. Still, it doesn't look too bad.

The bones were just built up to a reasonably pure white then shaded with the rest of the model using Army Painter Strong Shade. It was painted on rather than dipped so I could control where it went. I've found this gives good results on flesh and can work on other surfaces as long as care is taken - if you're not carefully it will pool in unwanted places and it ends up looking awful - even painting on I had to remove some pools a few minutes after I applied it.

In this case, it worked surprisingly well on the bone, the natural brownish colour offsetting the pure white somewhat to give a decent bone colour. It didn't work as well on the robes, with the brownish shade overpowering the underlying green. Next time I use it on cloth I'll apply it first then apply the washes so the colour is more consistent. It didn't do very much anywhere else, mainly because I applied it rather thinly.

The model actually turned out somewhat poorly balanced; the resin side is much heavier than the plastic side, and most of that weight is quite high up (and, due to the way I positioned it, hanging just about right over the edge of the base). Obviously this wouldn't be a problem with the original model, and the problem is negated slightly here as I filled the base, thus weighing it down a little, but still it's a good thing I made this model purely for display.


So overall it turned out well enough, and I learned a bit about rust and quickshade. I see it as a kind of a practice model; when I get around to painting the unbroken one, it should come out a little better (fingers crossed).