1. Introduction.
I'm writing this in case anyone wants the details, and writing it under the notion that not everyone is at the same level of building. If you want neither, just skip to the pics below.
This isn't a tutorial or article or anything else so formal. When I build, it's largely OOB with minor alterations. This time the alterations will not be quite so minor, but the kit wll still be mostly the same when it's done. More to the point - I don't have a real plan, I'm making up each step just ahead of implementation. The first thing that was discarded were the instructions! As yet, neither my skills nor my improvisational (read: haphazard) method justify a tutorial...call this an experiment in progress. I still haven't solved certain elements yet.
This is my second build of this kit. The first was just a few years ago when PL repopped the Bellringer (thank you, PL!) , and that was done with no alterations. The paint job is pretty good - the shirt is too clean and bright, but otherwise it's a paint job I'm very happy with. The seamwork, otoh, is only approaching adequate.
This build is intended to be part of the series of thirteen Aurora longbox monster kits I'm doing in black and white. The inspiration was simple: how good could I make the longbox kits look in black and white? To that end, changing the kits so much that they are unrecognizable defeats the purpose of the excercize. At the same time, each build develops skills that enable me to both do a better job and to better see what I can - and desire to - alter to improve the final build.
It's a stroke of good fortune that all of the longbox monsters were taken from black and white films. Had the series included, say, The Fly or some other color film, it would have thrown the whole project. Or perhaps to be more precise, I should say that each character is best known from black and white films - the sculpts for Dracula, Frankenstein's monster, the Creature, the Mummy, etc. are more or less inspired by the classic Universal films, while other sculpts are apparently taken more from other sources: The Phantom from "Man of a Thousand Faces"; The Hunchback from the film with Anthony Quinn; the Wolfman is generic while the Bama artwork reflects Oliver Reed in "Curse of the Werewolf". None of the kits are slavish to accuracy in either likeness or in the details of the diorama bases (some are designed from scratch, reflecting the feel of the films while not taken from any scene that ever appeared in them).
The only two kits that don't follow are the Witch and the Prisoner, both of which I'm omitting from the series. Neither are from films, and there are already a number of Prisoner builds in black and white.
To date, I have only done five of the twelve planned kits (I'm adding Dr. Moreau to the list). The most recent was King Kong, completed in 2001. It's time I make a push towards finishing the series.
(More to follow, with pics - I'm still typing it up.)
I'm writing this in case anyone wants the details, and writing it under the notion that not everyone is at the same level of building. If you want neither, just skip to the pics below.
This isn't a tutorial or article or anything else so formal. When I build, it's largely OOB with minor alterations. This time the alterations will not be quite so minor, but the kit wll still be mostly the same when it's done. More to the point - I don't have a real plan, I'm making up each step just ahead of implementation. The first thing that was discarded were the instructions! As yet, neither my skills nor my improvisational (read: haphazard) method justify a tutorial...call this an experiment in progress. I still haven't solved certain elements yet.
This is my second build of this kit. The first was just a few years ago when PL repopped the Bellringer (thank you, PL!) , and that was done with no alterations. The paint job is pretty good - the shirt is too clean and bright, but otherwise it's a paint job I'm very happy with. The seamwork, otoh, is only approaching adequate.
This build is intended to be part of the series of thirteen Aurora longbox monster kits I'm doing in black and white. The inspiration was simple: how good could I make the longbox kits look in black and white? To that end, changing the kits so much that they are unrecognizable defeats the purpose of the excercize. At the same time, each build develops skills that enable me to both do a better job and to better see what I can - and desire to - alter to improve the final build.
It's a stroke of good fortune that all of the longbox monsters were taken from black and white films. Had the series included, say, The Fly or some other color film, it would have thrown the whole project. Or perhaps to be more precise, I should say that each character is best known from black and white films - the sculpts for Dracula, Frankenstein's monster, the Creature, the Mummy, etc. are more or less inspired by the classic Universal films, while other sculpts are apparently taken more from other sources: The Phantom from "Man of a Thousand Faces"; The Hunchback from the film with Anthony Quinn; the Wolfman is generic while the Bama artwork reflects Oliver Reed in "Curse of the Werewolf". None of the kits are slavish to accuracy in either likeness or in the details of the diorama bases (some are designed from scratch, reflecting the feel of the films while not taken from any scene that ever appeared in them).
The only two kits that don't follow are the Witch and the Prisoner, both of which I'm omitting from the series. Neither are from films, and there are already a number of Prisoner builds in black and white.
To date, I have only done five of the twelve planned kits (I'm adding Dr. Moreau to the list). The most recent was King Kong, completed in 2001. It's time I make a push towards finishing the series.
(More to follow, with pics - I'm still typing it up.)
