Pickachu Got Rabies

I crafted something terrible this week-end. It was aimed to be a cute gift. It turned out a bit darker, I gave rabies to Pikachu.

Printing

I used to, on occasion, paint, model replicas and Warhammer figurines, sometime even Gundams. It is my happy place. I love the plasticity, playing with different materials and paint. And so this week-end, I had this request of 3d printing a Pikachu. My 3d printer is a Bamboo Lab A1 mini, fantastic nimble and cheap machine. Printing this model took roughly 2h maximum. I printed it in yellow as it fits this Pokemon.

Painting

The little guy has black ears, eyes, a mouth and some juicy red cheeks. The single colour print was a bit blend so I started to paint. Or rather I tried to find my paints in my cardboxes. For some reasons, last time my parents visited my apartment, they boxed all my crafting materials. And if you do paint minis, you certainly do know the pleasure of finding a pot of the colour you need, just to realize it is solid as a rock. To my observation, Army Painter pots are way more resilient to drying because of their shape, it seems to be proven by their higher survival rate versus the ones from Games Workshop.

The painting itself was messy. Without the good colours, I had to do my own melanges, I kept the raw yellow of the plastic, which means I primed black some part of the body. It is why it doesn’t look clean but I had no yellow!

When you have primed the spots you want to paint, it is just a first layer of paint for the other layers to stick on, I started applying red or other layers of black. The white dots for the eyes are just a Posca pen. Very easy stuff. I had some fun to finish with some orange inks to highlight the edge of the print. It was fine. I sealed everything after with varnish.

The Base

The 3d model came with a big base, it was too tempting to not add grass. The trick with grass is to always lay a first layer of mini-gravel and rocks on it. My collection of gravel and sand comes from English Bay in Vancouver, it was very close to where I used to live. It has some special meaning. Then you can just flock on the base artificial grass. I had to improvise because I had no wood glue. Usually to bind gravel, plastic and grass, you can just dilute wood glue with water and that does the trick. It gets transparent and it is pretty resilient. Having none, I used paint varnish and it worked pretty similarly.

Why Rabies

The rabies is just an excess of paint sealer in the mouth. It just fit the unclean model and paint job, and the 3d printing defect the mouth has. Looks like Pikachu has teeth.

Fun

This little adventure reminded me I need to do more. I have projects I havn’t started, like a Gundam given to me in Japan and that I need to do and I get so much pleasure from doing so. It is just extremely time consuming. This little fella took me maybe a bit more of 2h to finish. It is a lot of time for something so simple. Maybe I will come back in other blogs, trying to explain a bit better, as a tutorial, how to achieve some effects. That’s inspirational.