A couple years ago I bought one of Starlighting Projects’ “She Belong Dead” kits, and just recently I got it out and got serious about it. It’s a very simple kit: A skull with an electrode-equipped skullcap, mounted on a simple box-shaped base (with electrodes!) via a universal joint; but it has a nice Universal Horrors feel to it. I always hate to build things straight out of the box, and before I knew it I was in hip-deep.
The skull came sculpted with a steel yarmulke-like skullcap, but I thought something more feminine was in order. So I extended the skullcap downward into a sort of pageboy haircut shape, and added some rivets and bolt heads for interest.
The kit comes with pieces of soft aluminum wire, which you are supposed to bend into a zig-zag shape to represent lightning arcing between the electrodes on the skullcap. I thought it would be neat to have those lightning bolts illuminated. So I bent up some zap-shapes of tinted acrylic rod, and then I hollowed out the entire inside of the head and installed four flickering white LEDs from Evan Designs. Once the LEDs were in place, I filled the center of the head with clear epoxy, just to hold the LEDs good and secure.
Then I started to think: Could I make her eyes light up? Of course I could; after all, the entire central portion of the skull was a big ball of glowing clear epoxy now. So I carefully ground the eye sockets deeper, until I had reached the clear epoxy, being darned careful not to grind into an LED; and now her eye sockets flicker dimly.
Just for fun I added some flashing lights to the base, and she puts on a pretty good show in the dark. :rolleyes::D:D:D
Not as complex as most of my projects; just kind of a simple relaxed build.
She’d just laugh; she’s used to odd models hanging about.
…although she still says that she doesn’t like a Bride of Frankenstein bust I did a couple years ago; she says the eyes are “creepy”. (What higher accolade could a modeler ask for? )
I can’t tell you how impressed I am by your work. I actually get excited when I see that you’ve posted a new one. It’d be interesting to me to see a picture of what the model looked like before you modified it; maybe from the box top?
The boxtop pic is a high-contrast black & white, so I spent some time poking around in on-line Wonderfest photo albums, to see if anyone had happened to photograph that particular dealer table; no luck, nor does the dealer’s website have any good pics of SBD. So I scanned the boxtop anyway, and here it is:
Thanks! But I can’t spend all my time fiddling around in the hobby room! I usually spend an hour or two a day working on stuff before the paint fumes make the place uninhabitable.
I spend a lot of time waiting for stuff to dry: Spray paint, a couple days; Epoxy putty, a day; Styrene cement, a day. I can work on something else in the meantime, of course, and so I usually have a couple serious projects (usually complex vehicles or dioramas) and maybe four not-so-serious projects (usually figures, which mostly only need cleanup and painting, unless I change the pose) going all at once.
Not to mention that good ideas aren’t easy to come by, either. An idea has to be interesting enough to hold my interest for three or four months of build time, 'cause I’m pretty darned fickle.
I have a number of display cases spotted here and there throughout the house, but, yeah, storage is a problem. When I had to make space for the big spaceliner model, a large number of second-tier models got put into boxes and stored in the furnace room.
I tell people that if I bring a model home from the hobby store, I have to shove an old one out of a window at the far end of the house.
There was that one werewolf model that seems to have disappeared…
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