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| www.claytonemery.com |
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Chameleon Boy of the Legion of Super-Heroes. This is Cham’s “Booga Booga!” attack from a recent comic. As in, “Let’s throw everything at this guy and see what scares him!” So he’s morphing into a dragon, or a robot, or a warty monster, or something with tentacles. Oh, and he’s got a moray eel bursting from his chest. And he’s elongating his neck in a gross way. Painting was a Pain. I kept dabbing other parts while trying to get close. The color scheme comes from a minor scandal on an old Legion letters page. Readers asked, “What happens to Cham’s uniform when he morphs?” The conclusion was his “uniform” is actually his outer skin mimicking clothes, so really Cham walks around nekkid all the time. Hence here his tentacles start out blue, then turn orange, then metallic red. In other words, Cham not only shapeshifts to make the SHAPE, but also the COLOR of whatever he’s mimicking. |
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The Mad Thinker and his Awesome Android, which he gleefully admits he stole from Reed Richards. Proving that even the junkiest figure can be put to good use, the Android is based on a horrible X-Men Beast. I ground down his tiny head to become a neck. The head is the torso of a Men In Black fast food toy. I cut the body across and elongated with layers of card, then drilled into the tops of his thighs and socketed in dowels to make him taller. I then then padded the tiny waist and pelvis with layers of duct tape. I ground off all the straps and junk, fused four fingers into two and added crunchy fingernails, then cut the iron boots short and made chunky toes with nails. I covered him with Home Depot Concrete Patch, a bargain at $4 a tube. I then painted various grays and washed with black. He’s tilted so far forward he needs a base to counter-balance. The Thinker was some cartoon guy with a great glare and scowl, but a narrow head. I split his skull down the middle (Ouch!) and sandwiched in thick card. His hands are clenched in anger from a Chuck Norris. Unlike the comic depiction, he ends up with a freakishly large head and hands, which fits the persona. His hair is plastic string. He already wore a jumpsuit, so I layered on liquid sprue*. * Take a bottle of model cement, the kind with a built-in brush. Cut chunks of Evergreen plastic and dissolve in the bottle. In a week you get liquid plastic you can apply like paint. Try it! |
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Robot 13, Monster Killer. Obscure mini-series from Blacklist Studios, very gritty and epic. Check it out. Robot 13 is not a steampunk robot, but rather an "alchemal" robot fashioned in Ancient Greece to fight monsters. In flashback he's a shining gold and bronze hero. Then he fell into the ocean for 2,000 years to be dredged up in 1939. The shine is gone, and he's a stripped-down mess. And, we learn, the robot's "magic" central processing unit was some guy's head. Never daunted, R13 picks up where he left off, hunting down squids and a Cyclops, whom he kills by basically slamming a fisherman's hatchet into its skull till it stops moving. He's made of scrap. His torso is a plumbing fitting and a wine cork on a GI Joe pelvis. His skull is from a kid's toy glued inside a 1-inch acrylic test tube that took forever to find on eBay. He's lit by a torch lifted from a kid's castle. Wires trail out the back, and I just left them hanging. The rest is green putty, Legos, wire, and chain links for fingers. He's painted in Testors Gold, Rust, Steel, Copper, and Brass, and a greenish wash for long-time submersion. The mystery is to be continued. Like, why does an ancient Greek robot have a "13" carved into its skull? |
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Charlie Brown and the Kite-Eating Tree.  CB is from the Peanuts Christmas Pageant Set. I shaved his arms to fit close, padded the shoulders, then a simple repaint with a frowny face. The tree is from the woods with more branches grafted on, placed in a socket and wrapped with cloth to thicken the trunk. The leaves are fake ones cut small from Michael's. The string is tough thread. The base is cut from a CD case. The tree is scabby and lean, but then it's a Charlie Brown tree. |
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A pirate ghost ship diorama, really a platform for the DC Silver Age oddballs featured in Doctor Thirteen: Architecture & Mortality.  This protest comic was a nostalgic look and subtle dig at the "architects" bent on rewriting the DC Universe by getting rid of silly characters like Infectious Lass, Doctor Thirteen, Captain Fear, and a Nazi gorilla. A laugh riot for Silver Age fans. And it got the author (Brian Azzrello) in trouble for portraying "giants" like Grant Morrison and Dan DiDio in a poor light. Among other silliness, the oddballs sail the skies on Captain Fear's ghost ship. Check it out. This ghost ship is squashed together from an Imaginext set picked up cheap. I took the front of the ship and loaded on all the elements from the back: sails, cannons, crow's nest, companionway, captain's door. I added a few dowels and strands of string as rigging. I end up with a dense model only 10 inches deep. I sprayed it with Krylon Fusion (bonds to plastic), then white primer, then washed it with water-thinned black immediately wiped with a rag, then sealed with Dullcote. The wash brings out amazing details. The toy designers even put wooden "checks" in the figurehead "wood". The white background and open design make it an ideal platform for colorful action figures. Now I just need to make six or seven to fill it up. |
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Black Canary from FIRST WAVE - except she never made it into the comic. She was intended to join Doc Savage, Blackhawk, Rima, and others as shown in advance sketches, but the series was canceled after five issues. (Gorgeous art, way-too convoluted plot.) First Wave was a retro-1950s predecessor to the DCU. Azzrello pictured Black Canary as a slum kid of Middle Eastern descent who took on local thugs. Here I've cobbled her at 16, just starting out. She wears a Goodwill leather jacket, Catholic school gym shorts and knee socks, steel-toed shoes held on with clothesline, and baseball blacking as a mask. And ultra-blonde hair because it's a cheap wig. The bat is wrapped in barbed wire and streaked not with blood, but car paint. So far she's just trashing cars of pimps and racket goons, with the occasional ambush knee-cap. She's made from a Wow Girl (cheap sport-action dolls from Wal-Mart), Indiana Jones cult-priest legs, Mutt's jacket, and spare hands. The bat is from Starting Lineup. The barbed wire is blue and black thread frozen with Zap-a-Gap. Her hair is doll hair. I made her skin dusky because she's Middle Eastern. It makes a nice-odd constrast to the wig. Pretty simple, but tricky to paint. She's only 4 inches high. I tried different pens and pencils and markers for torn fishnet stockings, but got only jagged lines, so I left them off. Intriguing character. Too bad she never got to meet Doc Savage and Rima the Jungle Girl. |
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Mercury of the Metal Men getting stomped by a rogue Rock'em Sock'em Robot. This is actually strategy to make the robot slip and fall. Part of a larger diorama to come. Mercury is the DC Direct figure cut apart and attached to a chunk of old printer cover with the footprint cutout. I stretched his arm and neck by piecing in plastic tubing from the hardware store stiffened inside with coat hanger wire. I also cut his jaw open and fashioned a throat and teeth, because Mercury is always yapping. The rounded blobs are just white putty. I found the best sanding tool was a stiff rotary white brush in the Dremel-equivalent. (I use a Weecher grinder because a Dremel is too heavy.) I painted him with Testor's Red and Testor's Dark Metallic Red alternated and sometimes mixed. Mostly it's Mixed as a base coat, Dark in the hollows, and Red for high spots. The R-S Robot is just a leg so far. I wanted the Metal Men to battle one red and one blue robot. I glued a left blue leg to a right red leg (see inset). I don't recommend it. The pieces are asymmetrical and took forever to join, then many pieces of plastic card to even up. Loyal Lead in the rear is one of my first figures, modded from a primitive Toy Biz Hulk. You can almost hear Mercury squawking, "Do something, you lead-footed dunce!" And Lead asking, "Duh, what?" |
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From the Peanuts gang, Snoopy and his doghouse, with Woodstock and Patty. From the Christmas Pageant set where Snoopy is a sheep, and Woodstock is "baby Jesus". Snoopy is a simple repaint with a little S tail added. I laid on the acrylic paint thick to resemble fur. He has a coat hanger rod in his foot through the roof and a block underneath. Woodstock got new wings and feet from scrap, then a clear plastic wire to hold him aloft. The doghouse roof came from some pre-cut wooden model. The walls are tongue depressors from the craft store cut with a small X-Acto miter box (90 or 45 degrees). The doghouse is usually all orange in old Sunday strips, but I added white for variety. The name over the door is styled after one comic that showed it. Patty (the original, not Peppermint Patty) was a Lucy keychain in a winter coat and beret. I took her apart, ground the coat round, and jammed down a water bottle neck for the skirt. I also cut the coat arms down to short sleeves. Then I painted her green and drew on Xs with a Sharpy: it blurred slightly when Dullcoted, but fits. The hula hoop is a steel ring drilled and wired into her hand. Her hair is layers of Tyvek paper curves, as are her bows. I drew her eyes back on brown rather than black for a lighter look, and her smile not as wide. I've always had a soft spot for the older Peanuts characters who fell by the wayside, so plan to model Violet and Shermy and PigPen to round out the cast. |
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Hunter Emery, my son. A Christmas present. Caught in his typically sardonic pose, looking over his glacier goggles. Holding a rolled up comic and a bag of Cheetos. Wearing one of his historical tombstone rubbing T-shirts and baggy jeans. Head is from an animated Ghostbuster Egon Spengler for the goofy smile and little round glasses, then split up the back (ouch) and widened with wedges and the hair ground down and replaced with green putty. Torso and arms are from Chuck Norris (the kid is huge). I wrapped the legs with rubber bands to get bulk, then laid on T-shirt material with white glue, lining up the seams. T-shirt is made from handkerchief linen and white glue. For the comic and Cheetos, I captured the pictures, then dropped multiple copies into Microsoft Word. I resized them from 0.6 inches, 0.7, 0.8 etc. up to 1.5 inches printed in color, then picked a size that looked scale. I glued the front-back of the Cheetos bag around the edges with white glue, then stuffed with cotton and sealed. The comic is multiple pics of the cover laid together, glued, and trimmed. |
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Doc Savage Diorama. A work in progress. I'd built Renny and Monk, so needed a base, so need villains. The base is the roof of the Ghostbusters HQ with a Batman(?) door. I'll put a granite cornice all around and dress up the tar and wood eventually. Pulp villains always manage to look sinister and silly at the same time. I was trying to match bad guys like The Green Bell and The Inca in Gray's minions pictured. Mine is the Three-Headed Cobra, because I had three cobra heads in the fodder box. He's a Power Ranger (so there's a nice Oriental riff) draped in coffee filter paper robes and Painkiller Jane's cape and pirate boots. He holds a "Death Staff" which is just a shock rod (made from light sabers) connected to a power pack under his cape. The Mindless Minion is a generic 5-inch guy draped in coffee filter paper stiffened with white glue. He wears goggles cut from round tubing with a green wash inside. His insulated hood and outfit are painted cobra-like. His cheaper shock rod (a cut-down M-16 with brass rods) connects to a battery on his belt, sloppy welds and all. He might easily electrocute himself, but minions were cheap in the 1930s. I kept him simple, since I need like eight of them to outnumber Doc's crew. |
More to come... |