NetBase Hero Sculpture Process Pics

I finished this a few weeks ago, but haven't had the time to put a post together until now. If you follow my blog you've already seen this one. I used WAY too much plumber's epoxy for this, but hey, you've got experiment, right? There is a little bit of tin foil under his abs, an area I didn't feel needed to be reinforced. I made the big mistake of putting epoxy on his neck. You usually want to leave that flexible in the clay stage in case you need to move his head, but it worked out okay.

Adding the first layers of clay. As you can see I layered the clay on anatomically, checking the musculature against my drawings, pictures of bodybuilders, and an anatomical figure (from anatomytools.com if you are interested). This is a mix of regular (peach colored) Super Sculpy and black Sculpy 3. It's a pain in the butt to mix all that clay into one even color. I'd like to try Sculpy Firm next time. It's one even gray color out of the box, but it's really really solid, and I like the consistency of regular Super Sculpy better (so far).

First stab at getting a face on him. You may not be able to tell in this pic, but I also lengthened and bulked up his abs and waistline even before adding the belt. It was way too small, even for the caricature of anatomy that I was going for. Faces are really hard to do at this scale.

More of a face, gave him some hands, and I smoothed him down a lot more. He's looking oddly like an old asian man... I really didn't notice that at this stage... hands and faces are really hard to do at this scale.

Gave him some hair, and sprayed some gray primer on him. I should have used primer that is specifically made of models and miniatures, but I used metal primer from the hardware store. It goes on way too thick for this type of application, but I think I made it work. What I failed to get photos of before this stage is that I baked him properly, but then pulled him out of the oven WAY too soon. He cracked in about 50 places (not exaggerating), and it took about 2 days of work to repair him and get him ready for paint.

At this point I realized that he looked like an old asian man in the face, so I carved or sanded off half his face and did plastic surgery. I used a heat gun (at 12-18 inches away) to bake the fresh clay. More cracking occurred. I still don't like the face as much as I would like.

I used a combination of airbrush and cheap craft brushes with cheap liquid craft paints form Michael's for this. I fell in love with metallic, pearl and glossy finishes.

Plastic visor made of a file folder I found at Office Depot. Chest plate is a sticker that I printed on my own computer, placed, and carefully varnished with the airbrush to protect it. The whole piece was sprayed with clear coat (other than the visor).

I didn't get a picture of it before shipping this out, but he was made to have an iPad sitting on the black base with him that would display information about the company. I'm told that it went over very well.

I took LOTS of video that I intend to splice together and release on YouTube... not as a how-to, but more as a chronicle. I made a TON of mistakes with this, so maybe people can learn from those. But stay tuned either way if you are interested. It will take some time to edit and post all the footage, because I've never done it before.