Genestealer Update 20: Getting into the Meat of It

 In my last update, we'd just started painting the hard shell parts blue:

But you may have noticed there were a lot of holes in them.  Like these little windows in the forearms:


In the reference artwork, those parts are gaps in the hard shells where the soft, meaty parts can be seen.  So we need to start making soft, meaty parts that will be the same color and texture as the head, waist, and hands.

To do this, I had Jeff lay out some flat clay sheets cut to sizes and shapes that would fill each of the windows in the upper arms, forearms, and thighs:


Then we started texturing them to look like a strip steak or a piece of crab meat.  Initially they were just raked with a scrap of corrugated hose from a shop vac:


That gave us an initial set of mostly parallel lines of even-ish size.  Then he went back over them with finer tools to make the pattern a bit more random:


The final touch was a quick pass with a tiny wire brush to give the pieces a fibrous look:


While Jeff was putting the finishing touches on the last of the smaller pieces, I sculpted and textured the biggest piece to fit into the windows on the back of the carapace:


Then the small pieces were mounted to a scrap of plastic and a wall was built around them:


The big back piece was set up the same way:


Since we would be casting these pieces in silicone rubber, we would make a cheap but rigid mold out of urethane resin.  So after spraying on a copious amount of mold release, we poured a batch of Smooth Cast 300 resin into each of the mold boxes:


After a few minutes, the resin started to turn white as it cured:


I always enjoy seeing this transition happen:


Once the resin was cured, it was time to clean out all of the clay.  We had put down a lot of release agent, but since the mold was still warm and I was too impatient to wait, the heat-softened clay had to be picked and scrubbed out of the mold instead of coming out as one solid, clean piece:


Once the molds were cleaned out, they were ready to pour:


I was ready to pour too:


The pieces were poured in Dragon Skin 10 silicone rubber from Smooth-On:


To get the clear-ish, translucent silicone to the proper plurple color, I mixed in tiny bits of Silc Pig Silicone Pigments.  I used what seemed like the tiniest little bits of red, blue, and white, but still managed to make the rubber completely opaque:


Once the rubber was poured, I laid a piece of powermesh fabric over the top of each one for reinforcement:


The silcone rubber is a little easy to tear and very difficult to glue back together if something does rip.  Given how thin these pieces are in some places, it was vital to add fabric to make them less prone to coming apart later.

These were poured at the end of the day and this particular version of Dragon Skin has a 7-hour cure time.  So I left them undisturbed until the following morning before peeling them out of the molds:


The long pot life and cure time means there's plenty of time for any bubbles to work their way out of the part.  So the texture came out perfectly:


The only surface flaws I found were smaller than the head of a pin:


Since I have to mix the color each time we make a batch of these, we made molds for the full set of parts for one side of arms and legs so they'd all come out the same color:


Either way, I'm absolutely thrilled with the resulting texture:


Here's one of the pieces fitted into the upper arm:


And the bit of thigh meat in the thigh window:

So that's the first successful pieces of rubber for this build.  These are the simplest pieces to sculpt, mold, and cast.  So in the interest of graduating through levels of complexity, the next parts we'll tackle will be the knees and elbows and the tail.  Then we can get into the complex shapes like the hands, the feet, the waist/hip section, and then finally the head.  

In the meantime, the head sculpt continues to collect dust hanging on the wall in my office: 

Exciting new things are happening soon.  Stay tuned!