"How Creative With SCULPEY?" Topic

What sort of wargaming stuff have you made with Sculpey?

From your experience, what are the advantages and drawbacks of the material?

CC

it is very easy to work with, works well as a master for mold making for resin or hydrostone casting, but I find it is to easy to brake as a one off sculpt, and it can be tricky to harden small or sharp bits.(it blackens and swells up.)

this coming from some one who used to make a living from sculpting and casting. 90 percent of RuneSmith Studio's stuff was mastered in sculpey (now OOB)for now, as well as a lot of movie monster kits you see cast in resin out there.

Easy and fun to work with. For example, when I needed the sandbag redoubt for my little 15mm Rourke's Drift, out came the Sculpey and in no time a very nice little redoubt, with sandbags ripped in spots and little piles of feed spilling out…let your imagination run wild.

I wouldn't try to make fine little spindly bits with it… but other than that it's been great for me.
I've made lots of crazy terrain with it…

It's a good thing to build it up over a foundation of some sort… like strong wire bent to approximate shape. If you're making something big definitely build an inner mass out of tinefoil or newspaper.
You should use the flesh colored Super Sculpey… NOT the white stuff. The Super Sculpey is stronger and can be re-baked… so you can build a basic form for strength and then layer details over that baked/hardened form before rebakeing.
After it's done you can sand it or carve it for even more detail… I've used a dremel on my stuff and it works great for getting really sharp details.

Don't let it contact anything plastic though until after it's baked… the solvents in it will eat away at styrene.

I recently turned a couple of children's toy elephants ($0.50 each) into Roman elephant units by crafting a box (whatever the historical terms is) to sit on top and a bit of leather "armour" from sculpty. Worked like a charm.

When I've tried to do thin pieces, I've found it tricky to cut (deforms if you apply pressure; shreds if you saw) but a few minutes in the freezer firms it up enough you can get fairly thin pieces.

Handy stuff to have around. Also makes me appreciate the hard work that figure sculptors do!

Bob in Edmonton

I've made:
15mm headstones
15mm sandbags
25mm Dwarven warhorn that needs to be supported by a scaffold
various bits for terrain such as antlers, horns, crude gargoyles, etc…

I've made:

Squigs. (Including the Christmas Squigs.)

Chibi Wraithguard. (Cheaper than GW models, and just as good. Well, not really better, but people ooo and ah over them.)

I'm also currently pondering the reality of making a Lustrian pyramid block-by-block with sculpey. (I can't get the good foam in SoCal.)

has anyone tried their "SuperFlex" [product, one that stays flexible even after cured, so supposedly you could make rivers/roads etc? There is a person selling a plaster "push mold" of a river that is supposedly for the the flexible stuff only.

I'm working on a Spanish village church (15mm).

I'm considering using it for the headgear of my Voltiguers Canadiens (odd undersized bearskin with no plaque or bag).

I converted a 74 Pinto into a Ferrari using super sculpy. The hard part was getting a 2,500 lb car into a toaster oven.

There are 2 articles you should look for:

"Look Ma, No Paints", an article in Practical Wargamer (appeared twice in the publication) that was about a man making CRimean war soldiers in 25mm.

"The Fimo KId Rides Again" in Wargames Illustrated. This series of articles was about a wargame and figures made with fimo-including some excellent horses. (Fimo is a German version of Sculpey)

I have made some late Napoleonic Prussians. I made some horsed gun teams. I was unable to make the nice legs of the horses and have them stand properly. I decided to cheat and make a green base, and long green grass to act as a belly support for the horse. Detail is fairly easy to make, but sometimes fingerprints do show up on the figures. Paint is a good way to hide or embellish some parts of the figures like faces and hair. Fine details like traces can easily burn. Also if you continue to re-bake, a nice figure can toast and turn brown and ruin the color.

I have made several DHDs for my Stargate game. I built them over a wooden structure, and it worked very well. Last week I used thin slabs of Sculpey to make detailed panels for an Aztec project. I glued the baked slabs to foam and card understructures with hotmelt glue.

From the pages of TMP:
TMP link

I've used sculpy, (white, grainy)…supersculpy (flesh toned) and supersculpy III (multicolored) and there are several OTHER varieties including liquid and 'flex' and 'eraser' sculpy!

I've created terrain, spacecraft, planetary objects, asteroids, bots, aliens and larger character figs from them. While not as detailed as using epoxy, using epoxy for detail on pre-cooked pieces of SS works great and you can cut, sand, drill and bond it to itself…superglue works great with it…(just don't rebake anything with superglue on it! hazardous fumes!)…

If I had a 'website'…(and a decent camera)…I would post images of just SOME of the stuff I've created with it…to show you all the variety of stuff you CAN do. I've send/made a lot of items to Sally/Kev W of HF for 'fun' (also made of epoxy too)…like her 'infamouse' Alien Carniverous Mushroom forest and exterterrestrial 'zoo'! 8-)

As far as large pieces of terrain…it can get heavy/expensive…I would suggest using it as 'detail' pieces and use styrofoam, foamcore support frames, and the airdry 'crayola' polymer type stuff for larger pieces.

If you really want to see how detailed you can get for FIGURES using SS…drop me a line and I can email pics…as I've made 28-30mm aliens and 'bots'…from ss…also using sprue and plastic card for details too!

Happy modeling!
Lt DWW

I've made whole 15mm (approx) armies out of Sculpey. Very low in detail, but you don't need to paint them. They look cartoony, and I'm sure most people here would find them distasteful. But I had fun making them and they're cool in their own way.

I've also put fighting towers on $ store dinosaurs for HOTT, made cool looking towers and ruins from small grey balls of Sculpey, revetments are obvious, as are craters.

Bottom line, its so cheap and easy to work with I would encourage everyone to experiment with it. You'll run into tasks someday for which it is the correct solution.

One tip: larger and particularly thinner pieces tend to be fragile. For dragons and what not (anything larger than, say 3/4") I build a skeleton out of paper clips (cheap stiff wire) and then bulk it up with scrunched aluminum foil, and then put Sculpey over that. Saves clay, bakes better, stronger product.

Yes, I should put up pictures. Someday.

Andrew

The wife reminded me that I forgot to add our Final Fantasy Tactics figs. We've got Sculpey figs for most of the classes, and some of the monsters.

They're based on the chibis in the console game, not the more realistic concept sketches, and Sculpey handles the task quite well.