Hellboy Corpse Locator Tutorial - Part 2

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

The Dome

One of the smallest pieces but probably the most important, so it's worth getting right.

Despite a lot of effort I could never cast perfectly smooth pieces with polyester resin. I've gotten pretty good though, so your dome may not need too much clean up, just in case, here's the process I used to have to go through the clean up my domes.

These have been sat on my workbench a while, so they're a lil' fuzzy

These were cast in open moulds so the first job is to sand the back flat. I usually just sit it on 40 grit paper but if you have a belt sander that might work too. Try not to take too much off the sides or the dome won't fit as snuggly into the centre dial.

The outer layer of the dome is a bit gummy, which means it's a pain to sand. I used a dremel attachment to get as much of it off as possible (otherwise it gums up your paper)

After this you probably want to take more 40 grit to it making sure all the gunk is off.
Then comes the slow tedious job of sanding and polishing.
First I use 100 grit to get rid of all the tool marks from the dremel. The back of the dome can be left at 100 as it gets painted anyway.

Then the dome gets wet sanded with 240, 600, 800, 1200, 2000, 2500, and penultimately 3000 grit paper.

This is painfully boring and my mind tends to wander so I tried to be methodical, counting how long I was sanding for, using a small circular motion and always washing the dome when I changed grits.
The final stage is to polish. I use toothpaste and a pair of tights to polish. One of the weirder things in my toolbox, but toothpaste is just a mild abrasive.
Some people use an old sock for polishing, but I found tights are smoother and give a better finish, plus they're finer, making it easy to handle small objects.

Anyway, the end result of all that should be a nice smooth, shiny dome.

The next job is to paint the back of the dome gold. You can use rub 'n buff, but I found it hard to get a completely solid layer without really caking it on, so instead I just used a gold acrylic and sponged it on. 2 - 3 coats should give you complete coverage, hold it up to the light to see where gaps are.

Once the gold has completely dried then you need to etch some lines in it. You can sketch out a design before hand if you want, but remember whatever you do the final result will be reversed.
Using a pin I etch lines into the paint, continually checking the other side to see how it comes out. If you are adding LEDs place your dome over them to gauge the effect.

Priming

Once all the pieces are cleaned up it's time for primer. As with most things on this build though, it's not that easy. Filling the hundreds of undercuts with spray paint is near impossible, unless you get in close, over-spray and take out all the detail.
My solution to this was to water down (almost to a wash) some primer and hand paint the main body and lid pieces. It's nice and easy to paint, and capillary action causes it all to collect in the undercuts. Once this dries I then give them a spray to get an even finish.

The other pieces can be sprayed as normal.

All pieces then need undercoating in black. Unfortunately the same problem occurs with spray. So I do an acrylic ink wash first to get paint in all the tiny gaps. You could just use a black primer, I don't know how that'll affect the gilding

Stone compass anyone?

Then they get sprayed with matt black to give a nice even finish.

Gilding

Once everything is undercoated the next step is painting the insides of the lid and body. 

These parts are hard to see, so I just went for a loose, deep red, wood kind of colour. Painted on thick and streaky to give it a bit of texture. And if you're being really detailed, you can lighten your mix a little with yellow and add a very light dry brush to highlight it a bit.

Possibly the most satisfying step in the painting, is gilding everything.

I tried a gold airbrush paint, but for a really shiny metallic finish nothing beats 'Rub 'n Buff'. I tried using the 'Antique Gold' product, but it's really dark, bronze even, so I decided upon the 'Gold Leaf' variety.

I use a large stiff brush to dry brush it on. I found it impossible to do this without Spandau Ballet rocking through my head.
Start slow, but don't be afraid to go heavy with it and get it into the gaps, remember that all this gets knocked back a fair bit with weathering, If you're unsure, add more gold! You can always tone it down later.

Once everything is gilded then you'll want to give it all a good clear coat. I used matt because, although it is gold, we're not going for that highly polished metal look.

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Concrete Couch

I covered this project in extensive 'how to' detail over at Instructables. So here I'll just give an overview and cover some different aspects.

This project started out as a competition created by the University of Brighton Architecture Society.

You can read more about the scope and intention of the project on the University's website. As well as everyone who worked on it.

I did enter the competition myself, but being a first year I only made it through one round of judging. The final design came from a third year and consisted of stacked concrete blocks to create modular seating. 

The actual build took place over the summer. I joined the build team and our first job was finalising the design.

We decide to add lugs to more securely seat one block on another. We took our inspiration from how Romans used to join columns together. However our early prototype looks more like a lego brick.

This is still one of my favourite things I've ever made from concrete.

On that note this was a prototype created by the other team (attempting to make a chair by filling a large bag with concrete).

It was a beautiful object, like a concrete pillow, impossibly smooth for something so hard. A quality which, unfortunately, they were unable to recreate in the full-sized chair.

From our prototype we adjusted the design to have four lugs on top and to make them square.

We made a mould out of plywood. The construction of the moulds is actually pretty complicated, gluing together strips of wood that are chamfered so that we created the right shape for the lugs. The Instructable has more on all that, but I quite liked these diagrams I put together.

This is the first brick we pulled out of the mould.

A little rough, but we checked it over, made another to make sure they fit together and finally decided to add some lugs to the sides to help them all lock together.

The lugs are centered, if we had offset them we would have been able to overlap the bricks when stacking (like with traditional brick laying, or LEGO) but we intentionally constrained it to direct stacking, in line with the original concept drawings.

Although, by this time, I felt we had taken ownership of the project, the original designer was unable to join the build so we'd collectively made all the development decisions. The identity of the bricks themselves was totally different (originally they had been conceived with holes so they would thread onto scaffold poles inserted in the ground)

Then it was into production mode.

We cut a stack of plywood on a table saw them began gluing all the panels together.

Eventually we had a pile of panels ready to be assembled into boxes.

We had enough moulds to produce 5 bricks at a time.

We tried a bunch of different techniques to make the blocks more interesting, one of the best was simply hot gluing leaves inside the mould before pouring.

Other techniques included burning the mould, and hot glueing lines inside.

We poured 5 blocks at a time. Over a period of a few weeks we came in, broke down the moulds, cleaned them, reassembled them and cast 5 more bricks, then left them 3-4 days to cure. This method is known as batch production and we were able to make around 30 bricks this way. 

The final job was hefting all the bricks down to the garden so we could set them up.

 As seating they're fine for up to about an hour, which is plenty of time for lunch or a quick break. 

This was a fun project and I learnt a lot. Concrete's a really fun material when you give it a chance, we didn't even scratch the surface of the cool finishes you can achieve.

One of the main lessons though was how many issues you have to deal with in 'live' projects, designing stuff is easy, but the number of revisions and compromises you have to make when thinking about actually making it are what end up informing the design more than anything else.