Recently I started the process of making a Spiderman vinyl model that I found at Navy Blue at Seacon Square for a mate of mine in Boston - Eric Ryan. He is a big fan of the superhero. I really enjoy making models and giving them away to people who will appreciate them - not sure why but it gives me great satisfaction to think that somebody I know has my model up where they look at it and other comment on it regularly.
You can see from the picture above initally pieces of Spiderman's body were super glued together. Note the photo next to the figure, this came with the model to give you an idication of what the final result should look like.
After attaching all the limbs all the joins need to be filled with putty. I did this in stages. First time round adding plenty of putty waiting for it to dry then sanding down. Then I sprayed the joins with plastic primer which brings out the problems then I repeat until all the joins looked good to my eye and finished with a complete cover of the primer.
Next I masked off the blue areas and sprayed with gloss red lacquer. I just use these 40 baht spray cans that I buy up the road from the local plumbing shop. Very cheap and give a good result however the range of colors is quite limited. In this case however the color pick is not a problem.
In the picture above I've masked off the red areas and was about to apply the blue when I had a bit of a brain storm. I thought rather than create the model as it is - the old style cartoon Spiderman, why not update it to the modern movie version?
After thinking about this for a while I decided to go for it. Firtly I puttied out the old style spider icon ingraved on the back of the figure and sanded it back before spraying the blue areas.
While leaving that all to dry I got on the net and found this pic (see below).
I took this into Illustrator where I traced the spider icon to create a vector outline of it. I measured my figure and then reduce the icon to two sizes one for the front and another for the back and then printed it out. I then cut out the printouts and glued them to some relatively thin sheet styrene and cut them out.
After cutting them out I worked them over a bit with my new engraver tool then sanded them down and gave them a quick spray of the plastic primer.
Bellow is a picture of the model with the blue and red areas dry ready for the wash of silver to go into into the web grooves in the red areas.
After the silver was dry I super glued on the spider icons and gave the model two coats of clear varnish lacquer. The following are a couple of pictures of the final model mounted on a grey board.
