Secret project update

So! That project I hinted at recently, that I'm making my dad for his birthday (which was yesterday, oops) is taking a lot longer than I thought it would. I had a definite setback after the Munny Night with Maria (Museum Musings). The clay I purchased, that was advertised as "dry hard, no bake" clay, was a dud. It worked well with Maria's Howl Munny, as his entire coat was made from it and stayed in one piece. It did separate from the Munny's back, but I see this as a plus as it is much easier to paint this way. My Munny, however, did not fare so well. It was supposed to be a miniature of my father when he was a bit younger, with his hair blowing in the wind as he drove his Avanti (we will get to that). This clay I used (called Laguna), well, it shrank. As it dried, it lost moisture, and naturally shrank. Not so bad at first, when his hairline crept back a few inches.

"Well," I thought, "that's closer to his actual hairline anyway." When his face sculpting fell off completely and I could remove his hair as a single, helmet-type creation, well, that was a problem. Glue could fix it, maybe. And then the hair just broke apart. Huh. Perhaps not so fixable after all. After cursing and howling and whining about it for a few days to those who knew of the project, I pulled it together and trekked back to the craft store, bought some Super Sculpey (for the Munny) and some Delight (for the car), and called it a night.

What my project is actually trying to accomplish is quite simple. I am modifying a model car to look like a Studebaker Avanti (which you can see at the bottom of this post). In this model car I am going to place a replica of my dad. The car model I decided to customize is a 1965 Mustang. The body style is quite close, and with a small bit of front-end modification I can easily replicate the nose of an Avanti. I also cut off most of the roof to make the model a convertible; the Munny is pretty big in comparison to the car itself. It's been a long time since I actually put together a car model (I did it a lot as a kid, I loved that sort of thing), but it was fun getting reacquainted with an old hobby. So much so that I might actually make another car later on.

The car is about 99% assembled, and about 85% complete. I have only to attach the tires and front bumper at this point for assembly to be complete. I still have to sand down the mods to the nose and paint this bugger, though. For that I have acquired a metallic flaked sparkly bright limey kind of green modeling spray paint for the body, and I picked up cream and orange oil-based modeling paints for the interior detailing. That part will be fun, I love the crazy color scheme and dad and I are always joking about painting our cars obnoxious colors like that to begin with.

The car is much closer to being done than the Munny is; presently I still have to sand the Sculpey (it's been baked already), cut off the lower half to seat him in the car, and paint the bugger. Looootta work left. With the hectic trimester I have approaching I have no idea when this will get finished. Dad doesn't mind waiting (not that he knows what I'm doing) til it's done, so that's okay, I guess, but I still want to finish it soon.

We'll see! In the meantime, take a peek at the finished (re)sculpt and the mods to the front of the car. Rough, but pretty okay, I think!