This evening I decided to break out the lovely Forge World Great Unclean One, It has been sitting in it's case with rest of my Nurgle for quite some time and I felt that such an impressive model deserved some attention. Much to my horror I discovered that the two small horns on his head were broken, not sure how it had happened but naturally a irritating discovery. I decided that tonight I would repair the beast, as leaving it till later would probably mean next year. So here is Repairing Horns & Spiky Bits 101, lets have a look at the necessary tools for this job:
Putty
The putty of choice for this type of job is Brown Stuff, this is because it has less stickiness then green stuff and has a firmer finish once dry. This is a excellent quality when working with items that you might intend to sand or shave once dry.
Pin Vice, drill bits, Wire
The size of bit is dependant on the repair, In my case I am using paper clips to repair the horns so the drill bit is around 0.5mm in size.
Tweezers & Super glue
Necessary to hold the pins and securely plug them in place.
Using your pin vice and correct sized drill bit, locate the rough centre of where the paperclip/wire will be placed and slowly drill into it. Start slow or you run the risk of sliding out of place and damaging you figure. I tend to drill 5mm or so into the model, but this is dependant on the thickness of area being repaired, the more space you give, the less fiddly the work will be.
Using your tweezers, take your wire/paper clips and lodge them in the pin holes. Clip away excess but be sure to leave enough clip/wire to recreate the desired length of the horn/spike. Thin wire is actually better to work with in this case, as paper clips are a little too think, what this means is; the actual point I need to sculpt must cover and finish past the clip itself (a harder job).
Once your clip/wire is set into place, you can begin adding putty. Take a small amount of putty and roll it with your fingers around the clip, be sure to get even coverage around the clip or you will find that the putty will "slide off" the clip end. Don't worry about using too much at this stage, but be sure that any excess is pushed downwards away from the intending point. Once the putty has set a little (around 15 Min's for brown stuff), you can use a craft knife to shave away excess and begin forming the point of the horn/spike using sculpting tools, In my case I used soft silicon shapers. This can be tedious at first so be patient during this stage.
Once you have the defined point you desire, you can add minor detail using a craft knife such as grains etc After this, simply leave the putty to cure dry over night. If you are unhappy with the shape or smoothness, you can simply reshape with fine sand paper. As you can see with the photo above, the horn/spikes I had to repair were relatively small, I have decided not to add any grain detail and will paint the effect on instead.
And that's it! The process can seem time consuming at first but once you have gotten the basics of shaping and smoothing under control, it becomes a fairly quick process (not including curing time). The total time spent on this particular project was 15-20 Min's only, while I have explained this method in a repair scenario, the actual methods are just as valid for adding horns/spiky bits to custom models.
Happy sculpting!
Thanks for reading,
DiStudios
The 14th Legion
For all your modelling supplies, visit: Wayland Games - Discount Wargames