Watch This is a regular series where I find a YouTube video that shows neat tricks or tips for our hobby. From painting, building, or photography, I will be looking for great videos for you to watch and write up a brief summary of the steps used.

This week’s Watch This is on Sculpting Spines from Mr. Pink. He shows how he adds an external spine to kit-bashed Grotesque. While not something many of us would need to add onto our models, the techniques he shows should be helpful for many sculpting projects.

His Process

1. Add a dab of lubricant (Nivea lotion in his case) to the back of you left hand, allows for quick dabs as you are working the putty
2. Add a cylinder of putty along the back and smooth down with a Beale Wax Carving Tool. The idea is to make it smoothed back in with the rest of the model
3. Use knife tool to cut in the spine sections and separate each collum
4. Turn the knife tool upside down to poke in the bottom of the intersection to make it look as if it continued underneath
5. Switch to the silicon shaper to add a ridge along the top of each spine section
6. Switch to a straight tool (made from filed down nail) and poke the bottom of each section to add divot of where the ridge would curve under
7. Go back and clean up each section as the tools pushed the putty this way and that.

Wrap Up

I’ve dabbled with sculpting now and then, most notably with my obliterators but also the occasional purity seal or pose adjustment. Watching this video gave me some useful ideas for my work including adding the tab of lotion to the back of the hand.

Check out Mr. Pink’s blog (Modern Synthesist) and give him a follow.