Resnout (day 22)

The work on the new sculpt of the shoulder pauldron has consumed the majority of my time since I started this challenge. There’s still work to be done on it, and unresolved problems with it, but I need a change of pace. So tonight I gave the pauldron one more pass (removing the front spike again, realigning it, and setting it in place with CA glue again) and a fresh layer of epoxy putty to integrate the front spike again… And then moved on to working on the head.


As with a lot of this project, the head part is something I originally built ages ago. The basic work happened in 2006, and was more or less done in early 2008. Since then it’s had all this time kicking around in my model-making studio, getting broken, revised, dragged out for photos, etc. At some point the original snout broke off. All things considered maybe not a great loss. The original was a bit crooked, among other things, and I never felt like I ever quite managed to get it sorted out.
The new one was built by cutting a length of styrene tybe, chamfering the edges (freehand), and attaching it to the old head part. Then a new snout was built up out of styrene plate. One of the nice things about using the styrene plate with the grid printed on it is that I can align the grid to the part’s centerline, and then the grid becomes part of the centerline reference, if I aligned it properly, that is. The centerline on the head part is a little vague sometimes. But the grid is very handy for this kind of work.


It’s worth noting the new snout actually has a different look than the old one: the old one was based entirely on my old hand-drawn plans, while the new one incorporates changes that were made to the Blender model somewhere along the line. I had been considering building the snout from styrene plate for a long time, even before the old snout was broken and lost. It’d be easier to get a styrene snout to be symmetrical and properly shaped and centered, and I wouldn’t have to worry about hollowing out the end as I would with the old polyester putty snout.
I’ve also made various alternate builds of the head in the years since I made this original sculpt: 3D printed versions, a solid epoxy putty version I cranked out on a livestream one time, I experimented with making the head slightly larger, etc. – but in the end I think the original sculpt was a good piece of work, and there’s no reason not to use it.