Repairing a Peacock Mother Dragon

[Jerusha]

OK, so I’ve done a bunch of touching up my old Peacock sculpts, and wanted to post what I’ve discovered, for future generations, or something 😀 :

First off, I only used “Golden” brand acrylics because I hear that’s what they use in the factory, and I used the “Fluid” kind (as opposed to Heavy Body or OPEN). And a DecoArt gold paint pen, with a *fine* tip (ultra-fine has a metal piece in the nib that can scratch sculpts, and broader tips can’t do the fine point work). These are the colors I got:
Black
Interference Blue
Interference Violet
Interference Green
Copper (Fine): The copper comes in 2 different colors – Copper, and Light Copper. I got the “Light (Fine)” shade. But I think the darker shade might work better, because I had to mix a bit of brown in to match the color on the Emperor’s horns and talons, and do a LOT of experimenting to get the weird champagne violet color along the spine.

First, put a very thin layer of black on any white rubs, flea bites, chips as a base coat. Let the black base coat dry completely – overnight is best.

If the spot you’re fixing is blue, green, purple, or a blend, use the appropriate interference color/s tinged with a bit of black. All by themselves, the interference colors are too bright/light (at least for my older sculpts), but mixing in a bit of black makes a great match. Have a damp cloth on hand: that way, if the color is a bit off, you can easily wipe it away before it dries, mix in a bit more color or black, and reapply.

To get the funny champagne violet color, I mixed Interference Violet, Copper, and Black together. I had to keep playing with different combos of the three colors to get it juuuuuuuust right, but persistence pays off. Getting some retarder helps – it slows the drying time of the paint so you have longer to match the color. Again, have a damp cloth handy so you can easily wipe off mistakes until you’ve gotten a satisfactory color match.

I did the black base coat first, let dry overnight, did the touch up colors second, let dry overnight again. Then I top-coated with Liquitex Varnish. Some spots looked better with a gloss finish, and some blended better with satin, so I got one smaller bottle of each.

Hope this helps, for anybody out there looking to DIY. Good luck!

[Jennifer]

Glad it worked out! How do you feel about the final result? 🙂

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[Jerusha]

Jennifer wrote:

Glad it worked out! How do you feel about the final result? 🙂

Proud of myself! 😀 The results blended so well that I’m certain I missed a few touched-up spots on the final varnish coat, because I couldn’t find them! I was going to definitely sell the ones that needed the most work, but after fixing their flea bites and giving them a good stiff-bristle-brush cleaning (a couple had literally years of dust in the cracks, it was caked in and looked white, uck) – they look so good I don’t think I can give them up now 😳

I do have another question to pop out there for folks now: My male emperor had a chipped tail scale, and when I glued the chip back in, it was ever-so-slightly off the mark, so there’s a hairline crack that shows (and you can feel when you rub it) – plus a pinhead-size piece came off entirely and disappeared, so the tip of the scale is missing entirely. AND, my sitting spectral had one of his head scales get chipped – the very edge of it is missing. These are flaws so tiny you can’t hardly notice them unless you know they’re there and look for ’em, and the sitting spectral’s chip is on the non-displayed side.

Do I get apoxie sculpt and try to fix them (having no experience whatsoever with doing so, and running the risk of making it worse), or do I back away slowly, try to ignore my ocd-esque impulse to make them perfect, and leave well enough alone?

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