Merchandise - How dey do dat?

[Faub]

This topic is about how to make your own merchandise. The idea is not to give people links to sites that make the merchandise for you. The idea is to give people links and tutorials about how the thing gets made in the first place.

For example:
I made shirts for the last cookout and I've been printing my own comics for over a year now. While the costs have been significant and the returns negligible these have been fun and interesting experiences. But I'm not going to talk about these. Instead, I've spent the last few weeks making armatures and playing with sculpey and I'm almost ready to cast my first resin model.

Garage Kits are quite common in the manga/anime world. You can find them everywhere at anime cons. They're expensive to buy but supposedly cheap to make. I've had a hard time finding much about how to make them, though.

Some other links:
Micro Mark
Ladydarke got me a Resin Casting Starter Kit for my birthday last year. I STILL haven't had a chance to use it. This place is a general modeling supplier which means they sell a lot of the stuff you'd need. They're kinda like a Dick Blick for modeling. There are other places like this.

Freeman Supply Video Archive
This contains videos on how to make industrial molds, but some of it does relate to modeling.

Mold Making Tips
This site has a couple of interesting pieces of information. For example, they show how to use clay to define the mold line on your figure. It seems intuitive after you see it, but I was trying tape and twisting the model in different ways...

Gremlins in the Garage
This is the place I first heard about when I started asking about mold making. It has a gallery filled with a lot of neat stuff.

Armature
The first thing you need to do to make a resin cast of a figure is to make the figure. For that, you want to make an armature. I've been using a spool of 24-gauge wire I found in the necklace section of Michael's. It's easy to twist and bend. I can thread it and wind it to my heart's content. I also got a set of tiny pliers to make working with it easier, but the stuff just bends in your hand.

How you make the armature is probably not important. It's just a support for the Sculpey.

Believe me, the armature helps, especially when you drop the figure. The sculpey might crack, but it doesn't break apart. Not only that, but you can use it to gauge where the joints and such are for your figure.

The Model
Sculpey is a polymer clay that only hardens when heated in an oven. This makes it really easy to work with because you can mold a section of the model with the soft clay, cook that part then add more soft clay to the hardened piece and cook it again. This saves you some of the mind numbingly tedious process of fixing the arm you smushed while you were smoothing with the torso.

I have some other clay that came with the starter kit called Kleen Klay. It does not harden when you cook it. It does dry out and fall apart when you cook it, though. I will probably use it to make the mold line, but I don't suggest modeling with it.

After the Sculpey is cooked, you can carve on it with a knife and smooth it with sand paper. I have a Dremil tool, but I'm having trouble with it.

The modeling process is important. It determines the detail of the finished resin piece. I'm currently working with mannequin-like figures that I will cast and make resin versions. Afterward, I can add clothes, hair and details.

Mold box
The mold box is just a flat surface and a frame that you pour your rubber mix into. It's just a box. It can be wood, clay, card board, whatever. The Freeman Supply videos start off using half a Dixie cup as the mold box. Since that's a little small, I'm making a mold box from wood using a $2 sheet of plywood and a $2 1x4.

Also, according to the Freeman Supply videos, these need to be sanded and sealed so that the rubber doesn't stick to it. The sealant cost twice as much as the wood and it's all kinds of toxic, flammable and such. Since I have a gas water heater in the house (open flame) I have to do the sealing outside when it stops raining so I'm stuck at this point.

Positioning the model
This is mostly glossed over in the Freeman Supply videos. They either use a flat bottom, which is easy, or they do some fancy machining that hobbyists can't do.

MicroMark's instructions on how to make a rubber mold show needs supporting the object inside a cardboard mold box. This would work if the model was flat or at least somewhat symmetrical.

Human-like (or dragon or whatever) figures aren't flat. They don't even have a center line where you can position them and pour the mold so it comes apart cleanly. You need to make a mold line.

This site made a really good point that you can make a mold line with clay. Just fill in the back of the model and pour the top of the mold. Then break the thing apart, remove the clay and pour the bottom.

Pouring the mold
READ THE DIRECTIONS!! You have to apply mold release to the model or not. You have to spray and wax and do all kinds of things to prevent the rubber from sticking together. I haven't done this yet and it's the hardest step because you can easily ruin your original. This is why I went looking for as much information as possible before continuing.

Based on the videos I've seen, this step isn't hard. You can start by coating the model with a thin layer of rubber so you make sure you get the detail then pour starting at a low spot until the model is covered up to a half inch.

Pouring the resin
The mold needs to have air vents cut into it so when you pour the resin, the air can come out. Pour a little resin and tilt the mold so the resin runs into all the cracks first, then pour the rest.

Cleaning the resin model
Cutting off the flashing is just the first step to cleaning the resin model. I've read in different places where people clean the resin with soap before they prime it. Any bubbles in the surface need to be filled and any missing parts need to be fixed. I do believe you can use sculpey to fill in the model then cook the sculpey without damaging the resin. I'm not sure and I hope I'll be finding out shortly.

Painting
Games Workshop has extensive painting tutorials. Most of this applies even if your models are 10 times the size of a regular Warhammer figure.

Gallery
Some Anime Models
Gremlins in the Garage
Warhammer
Warhammer 40k
Google Images

[MixedMyth]

I have tried working making copies of models extensivly. To be honest, I'm not sure I'd work with sculpy. I've been trying epoxy based resin, myself. You can get the stuff at crafts stores. The major problem is mold making material. The latex stuff is lame, and some of the scilicone stuff is very toxic. This all especially true if you want to make two part molds.

So far the best I've found is a mold/filler combo called Alumilite. It's wonderful stuff!! I have had far more luck with it than anything else. However, it's also pretty pricey.

For model prototypes, I don't think I would use anything but green stuff. Green stuff is an epoxy sculpting compound used to make prototypes for those pewter figurines you see in gaming stores. It hardens over time, so you can work on a piece, let it harden, and add onto it without fear of squishing a part you've already worked on. It accepts really, really high detail and is relatively cheap for the number of figures you can get out of it.

[Faub]

I would also like to point out the Comic Genesis Sampler project:
http://sampler.comicgenesis.com/ <-- you can download the PDFs for the samplers here to see how the pages are arranged.
http://forums.comicgenesis.com/viewtopic.php?t=77838 <-- the forum thread for #4

Cortland used Adobe something to make the original Sampler booklet. I've used Scribus (http://www.scribus.net/) to do the page spreads for the other two and my own comics.

The problem with printing books is that it's expensive. You can easily pay more to print the book that you can expect to sell it for, which is why most people go for online services like ComixPress (http://www.comixpress.com/) and Lulu (http://www.lulu.com/) or Cafe Press (http://www.cafepress.com/). If you look hard enough or buy enough copies, you can get the price down to something reasonable like $1 per book.

For my own books, I wanted something that could be printed on plain, letter-sized paper so that I could print test copies for myself. Also, letter-sized paper is cheaper to print on than 11x17 paper, which is what you need to print comic sized comics.

The Scribus template I used for samplers 2 and 3.
The Scribus template I used for my own minicomics.

The key now is the size of the images you put into the template. I use 600 dpi images which produce a very good quality printout. 300 dpi is okay, but you can see the jagged pixels on the edges of text and word balloons. 1200 dpi is professional quality for straight black and white printing, text and such.

Scribus will produce PDF files that you can take to Kinkos or someplace else that's cheaper than Kinkos and have it printed. You could also print this on your own printer just as easily. However, the price you paid for the inks for that dot matrix printer is FAR more than you'll ever get selling the book you printed.

[Americangothic]

I can say that from doing self printing...this tool is your best friend. It is a long reach stapler. You can get them as cheap as 25.00 or get the deluxe models for 100.00+

The next big thing to get is a wide format printer. I got the HP wide format because it was cheapest, but the ink cartridges are small and cost more in the long run. Try getting the Epson wide format...they hold a huge amount of ink.

http://www.colourgen.com/printers/epson ... o_4000.php

Best ink I've ever used is called "Durafirm" it's an archival ink for professional printing in glicee (inkjet) printing. http://www.durafirm.com/



the next toy you will want is a guillotine papercutter. Dont get the crappy wheel kind..they wont last. Get a good heavy bladed cutter that will last you the rest of your life. I've had mine for two years and I use it for everything, especially bookbinding.

[Faub]

ooo green stuff looks interesting. I'll have to try it. For now, though, I have a pile of sculpey to play with.

[Ataraxia]

I've got a half-completed model of the Vadel mecha from GearHead that I have yet to complete. The side tails are going to be a pain in the arse to cast.

I do have a series of bear-looking aliens in 28mm scale, though.

[MixedMyth]

ooo green stuff looks interesting. I'll have to try it. For now, though, I have a pile of sculpey to play with.

I use a looot of sculpey. The major, MAJOR benefit of green stuff over it is that green stuff is a hundred times less breakable. Sculpey, when it hardens, is sort of brittle. Green stuff will actually bend rather than break when push comes to shove. Drop it on the floor? No problem! Chuck it against a wall? It'll be just fine!

It's also what I used to mod that Okami figurine I posted in OT.

[JTorch]

I've been working on a sculpey model of King Pok, but I'm probably not going to do anything with it except keep it.

[Laemkral]

Like MM, I've done some miniatures sculpting (not for a while, should really do some again) and I'll swear by Green Stuff. It's solid, durable, has a long work life, and the fact that you can do it in stages and continue shaping by filing and whatnot after it hardens is a major benefit. The only downside is learning to combine enough for your project and not waste a ton, but if you just make small batches each time, you should be good.

Don't ever buy it direct from Games Workshop, buy it from some other company cause you'll get a better deal.

[Mon Ami]

This is definitely something I would want to look into o-o!

[Kris X]

I'd love to learn modeling. Hmmm.

[Moonshadow]

I've been planning to do some kind of modelling in the future, so this is very helpful.

I will say, in my prior experiences (which I'm using for my current ones), I used a temperature-resistant room-temperature vulcanizing rubber for the molds (I'd have to actually find the container to see what it was called, I had assistance acquiring it), and for the release agent, I used plain old petroleum jelly, which worked perfectly. (The nice thing about the rubber I used is that I could cast resin into it, or pewter for metal pieces, without damage to the mold.)

[Faub]

The best way to learn something is to do it. I don't know about green stuff, but sculpey is $2 for brick large enough to make a 6" figurine.

[Swikan]

Faub: Hubby and I are loving this thread. We are definitely going to try it (You will know when we try it as I will probably be flooding your PM box with "SOS" messages.)

[TRI]

You've piqued my interest as well. Think I'll stop by the craft store on my way home.

[Faub]

I sealed my mold forms and poured the first half of my first mold today I'm waiting for it to cure, which should be another 2 hours, but I'll be in bed before it's done. The tricky part will be when I have to remove the clay I used to make a mold line.

[Aiken]

Sounds interesting. Would be nice to see photos of the kind of things you can achieve.

[Faub]

I'll post pictures eventually. I just need to wait until I've finished so ladydarke doesn't accidentally find the pictures on photobucket. The hardest part has been to make the original so far.

I finished the mold for one figure and I'm working on the second. A dremil tool cuts hardened sculpey and wire like butter. I had an arm that wasn't behaving so I cut it off and I'm going to make the model in two pieces.

Resin is great stuff. It hardens in no time and it doesn't take much to fill a mold. Surprisingly little in fact. I need so little resin to make a figure I have a block of resin shaped like the bottom of a plastic cup. It hardens so freaking fast!

Now I'm trying to figure out how to put clothes and hair on a figure properly.

The problem I'm having right now is I've run out of mold juice and I have to order some more. Be VERY careful how you design your mold box. It takes a surprising amount of liquid to cover a tiny figure.