I learn a great deal of what I know by looking at pictures (and real projects by others). I love to see step by steps too of course.  Two of the projects of late are now complete and I thought readers would enjoy seeing how they turned out when all painted up. When we last saw the Hornswaggler’s sign and the food boat they were just at the end stages of the sculpting process. The pieces of the sign got the usual three coats of base colours and then a series of glazes to age them. Now at last they are ready to head out the door and into the shipping container.

The cutlass took about three hours to run on the MultiCam. Late yesterday I pulled it off the machine and glued up the two halves. This morning I removed the clamps and used the air-powered die grinder to add some serious character to make it look battle worn. While I could have built the file that way it was far faster to do it by hand.

Then we used sculpting epoxy to create the leather wrapping on the handle. A thin layer of sculpting epoxy was applied over the skull and form other details  such as the teeth and the undercuts on the eye sockets. The mounting board was glued up today and tomorrow it will all be ready for paint.

Stay tuned…

We’ve been asked to create a sign for the game area of Scallywag Bay. We settled on the name Hornswaggler’s which offered lots of fun possibilities. I decided an oversized cutlass would be perfect. The sword will be sit in a wood sign mount and we’ll hang a sign just below asking all patrons to ‘stow yer weapons before entry’.

I created the vectors in EnRoute, tweaking the text and warping it to suit the slight curve of the cutlass blade.

The skull shape, handle and knuckle guard were created as separate reliefs using the dome tool. Compare to the original drawing above and you can see I got a better idea as I proceeded and made the hilt into a bone. Once I was satisfied with the shape of the handle I combined the five handle pieces into one relief.

Then, using the dome tool to make negative reliefs for the eyes. I checked the front view and after nudging them up into position merged (lowest) with the handle relief to make the eye sockets.

The lettering was created by creating a negative shape (subtract from) using the prismatic tool into the original cutlass relief. I should note that before I applied the lettering I created a second copy of the sword relief. This will be flipped to form the back half of the sword.

Next up is the sword bracket and other details. Stay tuned…

Today Jenessa glued on the last small bits and and painted on the last brush strokes to finish both train models. They look spectacular! As soon as we get the final measurements from the train chassis builder we will start in on the full size version.