Quite some time ago, before our move, I started the HIPPIE project with this post. The idea is that I paint up a figure and report on the progress of said figure with pictures. I’m now finally continuing with this process.

Today’s installment is about the cleaning up and conversions (very little, actually) done to the figure. As evident from the picture in part 1, there was quite a bit of flash on the figure, which was easy to remove (in most cases I did not even have to use any tools, I could just pinch off the flash with my figures). The flash in question results from vent channels in the mold of the figure BTW, which facilitate air removal from the cavity and are an important part of the production process of miniatures. Other than the flash present, not much cleanup was necessary — this was a clean figure.

On to the conversions, as seen in the picture on the right, which remained very basic. I replaced his cast standard with a florist’s wire one, by snipping off the standard and drilling out the hand. I left a bit of the original standard staff attached to be painted up as a cloth ‘handle’. The florist’s wire staff was topped with a duck sculpted from green stuff (trust me, it will look better when painted up — this is one of my very first free form sculpts). Finally, I added a shield slung across the figure’s back. The shield is attached with a blob of green stuff, and a belt sling was sculpted from green stuff (pretty easy — take some green stuff, flatten it between two plastic sheets, cut out belt). The green stuff that was left over after the duck, shield and belt was used on the base to hide the figure’s cast on base and hide the slot in the plastic slottabase.

That’s it for now — next installment will be priming the figure for painting.

Other parts of the HIPPIE series:

• Part 1 - Introduction
• Part 2 - Cleaning and Conversion — You are here
• Part 3 - Priming

Technorati tags: miniatures painting