5th Element -Picasso Sculpt CRITIQUE PLEASE

javakat343

New Member
Update 2018 : I'm FINALLY posting my process, now that I'm making my silicone and plaster molds. The process of my first two attempts will be summarized over the next 2 months. Find me here: www.facebook.com/AngryPixiDesign/

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Aug 2014

I figured it was about time to post something I've done on here. Since this is the first large sculpt I've done it seemed "worthy". This is Picasso, Zorg's little mutant elephant/ant-eater creature from the movie The 5th Element. I know the 5th Element community on the RPF is pretty big and I hope you like it. I chose to make this little guy instead of the ZF-1 gun for originality's sake since the ZF-1 has been done exquisitely by many fans in the past and I knew I wasn't going to impress there. Ha!

Please post below with any tips about working in this medium/craft so that I may learn!

Doing replica work is tedious! Constant ratio checking, definitely a test of patience. I'm also new to using Monster Clay (love it) and doing fat rolls and doing non human anatomy. So a lot of firsts. That being said, I'm not very patient so once I get the "snout" to a place I'm happy with I'll probably start my mold (silicone/fiberglass) and then cast in FlexFoam-It 3. If I want to make it perfect I'll make a positive from the mold with poured Monster clay and do a re-sculpt version 2.0....but probably not!

I'm about a month in. That being said I spent a week just making the armature out of Great Stuff, plastic chicken mesh, and PVC pipe (I gave plenty cure time). Very little wire or foil in the armature.
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Some pictures of me trying the compressed air freeze with sand paper buffing. Oderless Mineral spirits worked wonders on smoothing the sculpt but I found some cracks after it all dried. Was this from using too much solvent?
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The eyes were a pain. I accidentally put them on the side of the head before realized they oriented forward. They came out creepy and I redid them like 5 times.
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My friend came over and made him a mustache and a little dick and ball set.
 

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Updates: 4-5 years later is always a good time to start working on an old project again. I finished 2 different molds and didn't post anything because I was unsatisfied (and a little embarrassed) so I'm back at it for the next 2 months. Hoping to get some casts out before summer.Screenshot 2018-03-25 00.22.38.png

I'm going to post everything In chronological order so I'll summarize the journey and the actual quality work should come out of the wood work eventually.

First is my sculpting tutorial. I'm "known" (unknown) for ****ty tutorials. So. You're welcome.

Part 1 here!:
 
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The final product was really fun and well received at Seattle/Portland cons.
Find my work here: www.facebook.com/AngryPixiDesign/
See my "learning process" in the following posts
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So first and foremost this is not a screen accurate Soliman Aktapan. My guy is a touch smaller. Original dimensions are listed at (rounded up) 44x21x10 inches wheras my build was 36x14x7, made to fit me, a woman of 5'5".

My little alien has less wrinkles, more of a baby face, and most importantly, NO. BUTTHOLE.
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So if that's not your jam and scone I can't help you.

My first two attempts at molding and casting our lovely Picasso were fraught with dumb decisions. You, know guys, this is probably why I didn't update this blog, because I knew y'all would be giving me massive judge-y faces. I can feel them through the screen!

The first mold was done in, no joke, interior bathroom caulking. I guess I figured it was cheap enough to be worth trying, but I didn't keep extensive records. I'm guessing it was anywhere from $40-60 dollars because tubes at the time were about $6 a piece. I learned quickly that registration keys are important, which, of course, I did not have. Wait. No. I think I did. Just not.....important places. I could check my HOURS of extensive footage....but I won't. I think I had a silicone flange that was clasped between the fiberglass flange, but I remember it not working incredibly well as It kept tearing. Surprising!

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If you want to know why I have such a devious expression on my face^, it is because I was acutely aware how much I looked like Pyramid Head from "that one scene" in the Silent Hill movie. You know what I'm talking about.

Okay.

So you see in the left-most image that I've got some funnel action going on in the mold. Well....This was the beginning of the end for this first attempt.

If I remember correctly I tried some fun things. I really enjoyed throwing money at mad science experimentation that I was like 80-90% positive would fail when I didn't pay rent and lived in my parent's house.

Ha, jk, I still live in my parent's house, ha. You thought, ha, you thought I had moved out didn't you?

GRAD SCHOOL IS EXPENSIVE.

Well. So. I tried coating the walls of the mold with Plastidip, among other things. Because as many of you know, polyurethane foam is so clingy it would rather slash your tires than see you with another man. But that didn't work. Duh.

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(Caption: White Plastidip, slowly peeling off the silicone mold walls)

So I cleaned that out and tried the flex foam on its own. Hoping that the silicone would release the foam, no problems. I read the tech data sheet and knew the pot life was precarious, but alas, just because you know something is going to be ****y, doesn't mean you know HOW *****y.

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The foam was too thick to move through the small pour holes and pretty much spilt everywhere. I then tried taking a back panel off the mother mold but the foam expands so quickly that it's near impossible to bolt it back together in time. I'm just lucky I got my first few gallons of foam for free. Because from here on out? Money. So much money.

TLDR: First attempt=hot mess.
 
The second attempt was a lot better, I did a 2 part Matrix mold, and yes, I was acutely aware this would be a more complex process than a standard brush up mold but alas, I like the challenge on occasion. My mercurial nature eludes me *mimes at tossing hair over shoulder*. I was heavily inspired by this Yoda sculpt and cast tutorial.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtv-UXG8pwE

I HIGHLY recommend this "slide show". It helped me a lot.

I wasn't sure which method for suspending my mold would be best so I used bricks, eva foam, and other odd and ends to minimize the use of clay. I was sorely lacking enough monster clay but this was probably a silver lining because the clay became so inebriated with the stench of polyester resin long after the mother shell cured that I threw a lot of it out.
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I tried to make sure that it was an even-ish 1/2 inch thickness all over. and then mixed Bondo brand resin with body filler to get a muddy first coat before applying any fiberglass.
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Still not a huge fan of my keys, I think they are a tad thin to my taste. But overall a much cleaner and prideful job than the prior fiberglass shell.
 
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Like the write up but your attachments don't seem to be working. Would you be able to take another run at that?
 
Well as you can hopefully follow by the pictures(assuming they load properly), I finished my mud coat and fiberglass coat with some pvc piping as an integrated stand. Once both sides were completed (one side was colored red for clarity) I was ready to begin my Urethane rubber matrix mold.


This is where things got…..sticky. I unfortunately drilled my bolt holes in the flange prior to pouring my rubber and never sealed them so…well….It’s hard to describe the feeling of watching a $1+ per oz liquid cascade out of your mold onto your dirty concrete porch. It was literally the number one anxiety you can have when doing this type of mold, such a scary prospect it never escapes your thoughts and yet….it happened anyway.

Just look at this hot mess!

SO. I ran to the store and picked up some matching rubber, making it JUST in time before the specialty stores close around 5pm. As you can see in the picture below we lost about a quarter of the liquid rubber but the layers adhered, stayed sturdy, and didn’t delaminate at all.
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I decided on Urethane rubber for the mold because I was unsure that I could feasibly make a stone mold for latex skins with polyfoam for my final positive. A urethane skin coat would be better for this project because it’s not air cure (especially in problematic areas like the long nose), but at the time cost was a worry and I had to prioritize my budget so I made some “second-choice” decisions.

Eventually I threw this rubber mold away and kept the mother shell. I should have kept, but the casts had some defects and I figured I wouldn't need it when I did my next mold. Reviewing the video's and pictures I took I learned a bit but I still would have liked to physically examine it since it's been so long now since I made it. I was concerned that the mold wasn't thick enough near the toes of the creature, so in the next installment, I'll go over how I improved the mother mold and resin positive for my next silicone mold.
 

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Nice to read a post where you've developed a skill as you go along, helps us all of us who are still learning.


You got post #10 working fine, post #7 is still missing about 8 images.
 
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Okay so, to continue where I Ieft off: the urethane mold worked fine. The seam was good but not great, and at obviously urethane wasn't a great choice for latex skinning. It did do really well with certain urethane skinning rubbers, but I knew I wanted a silicone mold in the future.

So this leads us to NOW.

I would really like to weave you a tale where I've learned from my mistakes and this run every choice was prime and every step was textbook, but that's just not the case. It's sort of been a mess. A pick your own expletive kinda mess. I had a sponsor and I really wanted to give this guy a try before starting grad school in 3 months. I've been refining the old resin cast with Free Form Air (epoxy putty) for say a couple months. In this time I also set up a simple stand with ABS pipe so that I could secure the cast on top and secure my old fiberglass mother mold around the pipe for a new matrix mold.

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It seemed straightforward, sensible and frugal,

RIGHT PEOPLE? Well. Well. WELLWELLWELLWELL...

..Well.

This is the part of the story where I dramatically- as if I was a slightly too chipper Christmas elf- apparate a scroll, and with a flick of my wrist it unfurls and rolls out onto the ground. With a little sparkle as it disappears from view into the horizon as quickly as it appeared.

On this scroll, my good friends, is every little PENGUIN FLIPPING THING that went wrong. I'd like to think of all of them as learning opportunities but I think I just rolled a really bad DnD game in some alternate world somewhere and the odds were just not in my favor. Maybe I pissed off a god of irony or am a daily treat to a god of sloth and tedium. Maybe that helps my ego a bit. IDK.
 
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IMG_20180326_190859965.jpgIMG_20180326_223030043.jpgOne of the first things I did was buy epoxy dough. Overall the process started slowly because I had to add epoxy dough to areas of the cast, let that dry for at least a couple hours and then sand the area, rinse, repeat. It was tedious but I mentally prepared for that tedium and I really wanted the cast to look perfect this time around. I wasn't prepared for ALL of the little setbacks. My patience. It has been TESTED PEOPLE.

I re-enforced the inside of the mother mold w/ epoxy as I could see light coming through the shell in some thin spots. My thinking was that I had a solid 2 inches to play with. Guess how much mold space I ACTUALLY had? about 3/8 of an inch. My brain just decided to BS a number based on memory I guess? So. I spent a long time carving out all the dough I put in. (You can see in the picture the pink is the polyester resin mud coat and the light grey is the epoxy)

Close to mold time I realised is that the ABS pipe would be difficult to epoxy to the resin cast unless I cut it in half and assembled it upside down. I drilled through the pipe quickly enough but I also had to carve out an ABS cap into a ring to re-assemble the pipe together later. Have you ever had a molten hot shard of ABS fly down your shirt and into your bra searing through several layers of skin?

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The lazy Susan I was using for the veeeeeryy original sculpt came into play again for the mold base, but the MDF board was starting to splinter so I covered it with resin, which just made the splinters more spikey, so I covered THAT in foam. The whole thing looked like it was strong enough to support 18 pounds of silicone and another several pounds of support shell and a 2-foot resin baby elephant. I prepped some PVC support pipes and spent a LOT of time making sure that no part of the cast would touch the inner wall of the support shell.
 
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Okay so at this point I'm feeling pretty confident. My bases are covered and despite some ditzy moments, I'm well ahead of schedule.

And then there was pollen.

SO MUCH POLLEN.

I was sick with a combo viral infection/allergies for like 3 weeks. I went to the doctor for some "just in case" antibiotics which thank-a-diety I didn't end up taking.

At the end of this sickness, which I am most certainly not down with, I am starting to feel anxiety creep in. I mean, anxiety lives with me rent free, like, all the time, but my point is I was starting to get nervous about the deadline and I knew that the actual silicone molding was something I was just going to have to leap in and do, lest I procrastinate out of fear of messing it up. I was getting into the money of the project, I couldn't be sure if the 1-gallon kit was going to cut it for volume, and frankly, I had messed it up before. I told my friend who came over to help, that my last attempt at the matrix mold leaked a substantial amount of urethane, and we had to be super careful to use every drop of Rebound 25 this time around.

I was so paranoid about being on the budget that I didn't buy any extra silicone or Thivex and I didn't even CONSIDER not reusing my original fiberglass mother shell.

Still feeling sick, I set the date for the molding. That night we practised assembling the mother shell, discussed pot life, setting timers, the proper mixing process, all of the molding options and fine details. Initially, I knew that Rebound 25 was a brush on silicone and it would be best to do at least two coats before doing a thickened coat with Thivex and bolting the shell over the mold. I knew that we couldn't realistically do more than 2 coats without the silicone becoming too thick for the allowable negative space inside the mold and that would have issues bolting the 2 halves of the mother back together if we were even the slightest bit too thick with the initial coats. I had been so tired that I couldn't bring myself to fight through an hour of Seattle traffic to make it to the supplier for the Thivex and decided to go ahead without it. We discussed cutting a hole in the mold and doing one brush-on prime coat and then doing a pour coat. We discussed the hypotheticals of the physical properties of the viscosity and really tried to play out the scenarios.

So we talked and talked and talked and when we were SURE we were prepared, we set out to start the first coat.

The first coat went smoothly. We mixed just the right amount of silicone, dabbed on the print coat making sure we didn't have air bubbles, wasted very little silicone. While this coat started to tack (recommended wait time between coats is 60 min) we ran to the local Target to grab a spare hot glue gun because I figured the liquid, while very very thick (so thick the drill mixer didn't have enough torque to mix it without jamming), would still leak and I wanted to make sure I didn't have a repeat of my last leaky mold. I figured hot glue and Monster clay would make a sufficient barrier around the flange of the mold and because I didn't buy the Thivex we should do a pour fill instead of a brushon and then clamp method. We decided that 3 coats was too risky, that 2 total would be the safest bet. We were confident that the prime coat was well done and thick enough to support this plan.

SO. We started mixing the silicone.

Let me repeat that.

We didn't prepare a timer, we didn't pre-bolt the shell, or prepare a proper hole and spout for the silicone pour, we didn't hot glue the seams, we didn't apply any clay to the seam flange.

We started mixing the silicone.
...
..
.
.
.

I can't, actually, even.

I can't articulate to you how, HOW in the world this happened.

At some point I hear my friend say "we've been mixing for 15 minutes". AND I PANIC. I realize we might have just made a $200 mistake and I have no way of knowing if it's actually been 15 minutes or just 5. (Pretty sure it was 5)

I was able to quickly dremel a 1 1/2 inch square as a pour spout. But when I went to get the funnels in my workshop I discovered they were ALL dirty and covered in misc materials NOT excluding freaking latex. Unusable.

We then bolted the assembly together, quickly enough, and realized that while we had the sense enough to plug the hot glue guns in, we didn't, however, put the glue sticks in the guns. Unusable.

We agree it's now or never and hoist this giant bucket of silicone over the pour hole.

AAAAAND?

Yeah that sucker is too thick and it won't go in. It's too viscous and it won't drain efficiently enough into the cavity. Hindsight makes me think that if the rig was a little shorter and the giant bucket of silicone wasn't so heavy and if our chill actually existed in that moment that we would have just slowed down and it MIGHT have been fine, but I doubt it.

SO. We panicked some more. We undid the bolts opened that sucker up and slathered the slicone on the bust and on the inside of the mother shells and decided, Thivex or not we had to go back to plan "A" and FAST.

We bolted it back together and watched the slime slowly ooze out of the mold.

Oh and here is something I never thought of before. Why was the assembly so tall? I worked at Home Depot and I drove many a forklift I know how precarious weight gets in combination with that height. Maybe I thought it was workable at standing height. GOD. IDK. I'm not an engineer I just serially date them! (But seriously, I did consider the potential problems with it being top heavy and made sure it was stable prior. At that height, I can comfortably sculpt and sand the underside. I've got to give myself some credit.)

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After everything started to set and thicken (which, again, to try to give myself some credit, I was PLANNING on accounting for this, using a timer, whatever, jussaying) we stood back and laughed. What a disaster, huh?

LOL. I honestly felt a bit like a bashful superhero, rubbing the back of my neck, blushing as I surveyed all of the collateral damage.

It wasn't until 2 days later that I felt like a total joke.
 
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After this disaster I realized I allowed a lot of things to impact my good decision making: panic, pride, and good old Murphys Law. There was definitely some fatigue brain in there as well, and I enlisted help of a friend who I thought had experience when he had none, so It was quite the adventure.

After a very brief wallow, I wanted to get into this mold and assess the damage, but it was A STRUGGLE. The suction and mechanical friction in the mold was intense so we had to cut the mold into 6 pieces to remove it, but finally with help of several different friends we got that bad boy open. The trunk was mostly complete and there was a thick layer along the belly, but over all… it was not great. We trimmed the fat and prepped it for repair. I did some delaminating tests to see if the silicone would stick without peeling, did some tests with cleaning solvents and other factors and thankfully it was looking super green ;). I bought another $200 of silicone and got to work!
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Now, I don’t know if I mentioned this part but as you can see in the pictures I did a standing rig. This would probably have worked out fine if I had done 2 priming layers and then a nice thick thivex layer, as is recommended and WAS previously planned, instead of my one and done disaster movie.
And, of COURSE, as luck would have it, my friend didn’t know how to assemble the mother on the rig so he accidentally pushed too hard on the bolt and it slipped into the pipe. This, plus the pressure 18 pounds of liquid silicone, caused the whole shell to slip down, causing the negative space to become SUPA THICC on the bottom (a whopping 1 inch thickness, ladies) and the space on the top became super thin, even touching the mold in places.

If I had secured the bolts better it would have been fine. I even bought pvc pipes to use as support rods but ended up not using them in the panic.
Bygones aside, what this meant is that I spent the next several days in a Promethean effort to sand away the inside of the beautifully smooth polyethylene mud coat, and fiberglass coat, and several layers of junk of the outside of the mold to make room for the new silicone layers.
If I wasn’t clear when I used the term “Promethean”, this was TOURTURE.
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Because, of COURSE, as nothing goes smoothly with this project, the never ending sanding produced so much particulate HELL that my parents started blaming me for the smoke alarms going off in the middle of the night, saying it was messing with sensors or some such. IDK. The sanding space was outside on the back porch….which conveniently bordered a doggy door. And, of COURSE I discover only after a couple days that there was no filter in my shop-vac and that any of the filters I buy don’t fit properly, because, of COURSE.

Lots of inner sanding, outer bondo-ing later I was ready to go.

The first half was an easy pour because the old silicone layer kept it perfectly in place while we could pour fill the remaining cavity and all the air bubbles could float to the top. (Keep count peoples, this might be the only thing that has gone smoothly since the prime coat!) The second half was harder because we had to do several “brush on and compress” layers, similar to the first attempt. We could have done a pour but after the first repair layer the mold was already too thick and the mother shell wasn’t fitting, leaving a large inch gap, not along the belly but along the spine. I tried figuring out where the problem spots were and sanding those areas but it was simply taking such a long time because the shell is such a complex shape that the orbital and mouse sanders as well as the Dremel doesn’t fit easily into those spaces. I spent so much money on Dremel bits and sanding pads. GUYS.

Eventually I said screw it and went ahead even with the thick gap.
When the skys had cleared and the silicone had set I FINALLY took the little guy out.

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It was hilariously parallel to giving birth; strenuous and labor intensive. Once again, any simplicity flew out the window as the filler primer spray paint I had used had stuck to the silicone and was making it really difficult to pull the buck out.

And. AND. AAAAAND. Of COURSE ™ I dropped my phone on the ground and lost all of those hilarious pictures, so take a moment and imagine the scene. Good times. Thanks.

Currently using an old iPhone which does well with pics so I can’t complain too much. Supplementing with Insta as well because I think I’m funnier there or something. And YEAH, my cloud storage was full, mkay?

I used a bit of the urethane to pull the spray paint out and got the rest with Acetone. I tried a bunch of solvents, but acetone definitely worked best. Its worth your time to test those out and read up on the safety factors btw.

As of now? Like right now? Well the molds clean, I threw some silicone in a couple of air bubbles to patch em’ and I’m going to cast the alien babe today or tomorrow depending on…whatever gets thrown my way.

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SO I've started grad school so I don't have too much time for long rambling Epics. So I will tell you that the first cast came out great! The foam from BJB (TC-266) was SO FREAKING SOFT. Every other foam I've tried has PALED in comparison to this foam so I highly recommend BJB, their sales team and product quality has really made a lasting impact.

The cast was great but MAN was my paint job awful. I made all the "standard" mistakes when it comes to working in urethane (or silicone) paint.

First, this is what they TELL YOU TO DO. This is the standard professional advice.
~Use a color wheel.
~Don't work in opaque colors and keep the colors translucent.
~Thin your material (urethane or silicone) with solvent (usually mineral spirits)
~work in layers of splattering, mottling, etc
~More stuff and stuff

And then there is what I did:

I figured (incorrectly) because of the design of the creature I would only need one thick coat and there wasn't a need for the several thin brush-on or air bush coats thinned with mineral spirits. I figured (incorrectly) because the material was thicker it would be less likely to run. I found the weight of the paint led it to drip probably more so than a thinned material.

I (incorrectly) assumed all drops were the same. A drop is actually a calculated unit of measurement! I was unknowingly adding less pigment to the mix using a random drop off a plastic fork or toothpick than I would have with a measured dropper.

I (STUPIDLY) assumed I could achieve pastel colors WITHOUT any white pigment, because I (incorrectly) assumed that white would somehow mess up the transparency of the paint (its the ratio that matters there). I just figured I would add very little pigment and use very translucent colors.

YET SOMEHOW!?!?!?!?....

....I painted the cast with reds and blues that were WAY WAY WAY too dark. And I honestly think that my lack of experience, plus the late hour, plus the poor lighting in a dark basement room, plus the fumes which I was not practicing good safety around, let to the (incorrect) assumption that instead of removing the layer (which can be easily peeled off before it fuses) I could fix the problem by adding flesh coats over top.

This meant that I added SEVERAL thick flesh layers at opacity that was too low because of the dropper issue. Which led to a final paint job that was decent looking from as little as 2 feet away, but up close looked wicked witch melty. And while not at ALL color accurate to the tropical pastel pallet (I still don't know if I should show this to a friend who works as a colourist because I just don't know if she'd find it funny or rage-inducing), I like the splatter and drip techniques that I kept and the abstract sort of style I gave as a homage to the simpler "camo" look in the original design.

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Hi there... Critique, eh? okey doke... First off, Gender bent Zorg cosplay is gorgeous! Looks fantastic... now on to piggly wiggly... Since you've already pointed out the oopses yourself, I don't need to go too deep into those. The sculpt is fantastic, solid work there, and your colors do actually look good... yeah, a little dark and heavy... kinda like a box of melty Otter Pops in the post just before this, but again, you already addressed that, which is a credit, because you have no idea how many people would make worse mistakes and call it good, lol. Painting is a beast to get right, especially when you're working outside your comfort zone, and all the mistakes are a good thing, because that's how you learn and improve, right?

The instagram pic in your return post looks really good. The colors blend much better, so definitely an improvement. Overall, I'd say you did really good for your first large scale sculpted prop... It's Picasso!

And again, love the cosplay... Great job!
 
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