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I was hired to create these six-inch-plus action figure prototypes by Canadian toy designer/artist Chris Johnson. Chris is a talented guy, with a likeable commitment to bringing grisly horrors to Junior’s playbox . The last time I heard from him he was developing cuddly toy versions of H.P. Lovecraft’s monsters. The world can’t wait to see an idea like that.
Water Raiders was a line of buccaneering sea-creature figures that Chris had masterminded. I sculpted their prototypes predominantly in Super Sculpey, a polymer clay that behaves like traditional plastiline modelling clay, with the added bonus that you can bake it hard. (A conventional oven, a hot air gun or even a hairdryer will do this.)
This is a big luxury if you’re doing small, detailed work where every inch has to be to perfect. Imagine you’ve sculpted and textured most of your monster, but there are a few inaccessible places that your tools can’t reach properly. With Sculpey, all you have to do is cover the unfinished areas with wet cotton wool and then bake the whole figure. The areas without the cotton wool set solid, the areas with the cotton wool remain workable, and you can flip your creature over and tidy up the rough parts without fear of putting a clumsy finger through your earlier work.
Off the shelf, Super Sculpey comes in a flesh-effect colour. This has its uses, but its waxy quality makes surface detail look misleadingly soft and for most jobs I knead in some black Fimo modelling material as an extra. Fimo
is another home-oven craft clay: I find it too coarse and crumbly to be much use on its own, but it blends into Sculpey great. A 80/20 mix of Sculpey to black Fimo gives a compound with a familiar flat grey clay colour and no translucency.
The only other tip I can give you about working with Sculpey is to always handle the finished product on carpeted areas. The packaging talks about it being “shatter-resistant” and “ceramic-hard”, but there’s pieces of sculpture dashed to the four corners of my tiled kitchen floor that’ll tell you a different story…
Anything I didn’t sculpt in Super Sculpey, I sculpted in Milliput instead. This is a two-part epoxy putty, and the advantage it has over Sculpey is that it sets absolutely rock hard. The working time at room temperature is a few hours, but if you warm it under the bulb of your desk lamp you can make it harden in three-quarters of an hour or less. It’s a little too sticky and uncooperative to use extensively (“it’s the devil’s spunk!!”, as a colleague of mine exclaimed), but it works well for small fragile items and forms which have to withstand a lot of sanding and smoothing. I used it for the characters’ weapons, the Jaris figure’s mohican, and so on.
As
far as the creative part of the process goes: Chris had sent me his
designs in the form of very economical, Disney-style line drawings.
These struck a nice balance, because they gave me definite guidelines
to work within but left the brief open enough for me to add my own
riffs in terms of the specifics of anatomy and texture. We decided
from the outset that we wanted the characters to look like cool little
movie monsters rather than toys - definitely more McFarlane than Mattel.
Obviously the figures had to rotate at the limbs (making them a little
squarer at the shoulder than the ideal) but that was the only concession
made. To be honest, I’ve never appreciated the weird stylisation that
you see in a lot of toy stuff. The Action Man I owned as a kid had
a physique closer to a weedy, surgical-plastic Robocop than anything
you’d see on a human being!
The final Water Raiders prototypes had to be robust enough to make it halfway round the world, so the last stage was to mould the completed Sculpey and Milliput originals and cast them in resin. With pieces this small and detailed I could do without mould seams and bubbles scarring the castings, so I made one-piece silicone moulds that wouldn’t trap air. A picture paints a thousand words, so here’s four to save my typing fingers.
Firstly, the original has to be supported so that the moulding rubber can flow completely around it. In the diagram, the thin things are wooden cocktail sticks cut to size; the cut ends are superglued to the grey base, and the pointed ends are superglued to the low points on the sculpture. At the bottom is a single short length of thicker dowel rod, superglued to the base and an inconspicuous place on the sculpture. You have to work your way round the original, gluing in place enough cocktail sticks to hold it securely aloft. Yep, it requires patience, but at least you’re not making a model of St. Paul’s out of matchsticks.
Next, this arrangement is sealed inside its own open-topped box. In the photograph I’ve done this by hot-gluing sheets of 5mm perspex in place. Then fill the box with silicone rubber to encase the original and create the mould. Do this by pouring the rubber slowly into the corner of the box and letting it rise up the sculpture - you’ll minimise the risk of trapped air pockets this way. Incidentally, it’s best to use a good flexible brand of silicone with a high tare strength, to withstand the rigours of what’s to follow.
Once the rubber has set in a solid block, dismantle the box around it and turn it over. Pull out the dowel rod and cocktail sticks using needle-nosed pliers, and then make a scalpel slit in the silicone just big enough to tease the sculpture out of. The silicone should be thick enough that it returns to its original shape - usually you don’t even need to tape the slit shut.
All right, so now you have a pretty cunningly designed mould: the place where the dowel rod was forms a pour hole for your fastcast resin, and the vents left by the cocktail sticks allow air to escape from the mould cavity as it fills up. The watery, low-viscosity variety of fastcast gives the best results, and the body of a syringe makes a good funnel to get it into the mould. You know the mould is full when you see fastcast coming up out of the cocktail stick vents.
Once the pour has set, all you have to do is use the pliers again to pull the excess material out of the vents, and then you’re ready to wrestle your near-perfect resin duplicate of the original sculpture out of the pre-cut slit in the mould. Clever stuff. Needless to say, I didn’t invent any of it!
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