For my Halloween post, I've decided to debut my near-finished first complete sculpt. The figure is the Tall Man from one of my favorite horror films, the 1979 cult classic Phantasm. I've always wanted a miniature of the Tall Man to use as one of the baddies in gaming, but I could never find a figure with the right look. I finally decided to take matters into my own hands and sculpt a figure myself.
The arms are actually removable at the moment, because I wanted to cast up the body by itself so I could have the figure with different arm poses. I initially scaled the figure to 6'8" in height, because that was Angus Scrimm's actual height with 4" lifts, but I decided to go a little taller because he just didn't seem tall enough in 1/72 when compared to other figures. To go with the Tall Man, I rolled up some 1mm balls of Kneadatite to create sentinel spheres. The ball in his hand was glued to a short segment of clear sprue that was stretched over a flame.
Below is another silver sentinel spheres on a longer piece of sprue. Follwing it are two gold sentinel spheres which are just round head map pins painted in gold. I would have liked to find some 1mm round head pins for the silver spheres as well, but I couldn't find any (I know it is pedantic, but the silver spheres are smaller than the gold spheres). The paint was somewhat of an issue because I could not get the chrome-like finish on the spheres like in the films. I discovered that my "chrome" silver spray was not chrome silver, and that the metallic golds that I used was too dark. I gave the gold spheres a wash with a lighter colored gold, but it made the spheres lose their metallic luster.
This final picture is of Star Wars MicroMachines Jawas, which can be used as Lurkers - the compacted reanimated zombie slaves of the Tall Man. The first four poses of Jawas comes from the Jawas figure set (66076). The fifth Jawa came from one of the Mini Head sets, but I don't remember which one, and the final Jawa came from one of the large MicroMachines playsets, again I don't remember which one.
Now what do I do for a balding ice-cream man with a ponytail and shotgun?
3 comments:
Thanks west,
I have a lot of respect for sculptors as well. It's not something that I would want to do on a regular basis.
Oh wow! I love that movie. Please sell me one! That's a really impressive sculpt. Horror in 1/72 seems very possible now with werewolves and vampires already available in metal and so many great old pre-slotta and collectable plastic figures to use. Great blog.
Hi Yaffle,
Thanks for the comment. I'm not set up for metal casting any more, and the current resin I'm using is pretty crumby for figures. However, feel free to contact me through the e-mail address in my profile. When I find a new resin that I like, I will be glad to send you a copy of the Tall Man.
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