WIP: My Rhino Can Laser

Or, how to shape styrene in a panic.

Got a lot done on My Rhino Can Laser before a new batch of commission work comes in. Nothing like a deadline to get your workbench cleared! This will be the last update before completion!

When we last left off, I had most of the rhino painted, the eyes drilled, I just had to do the dreaded cape. I looked into two different ways to do a cape; either sheet styrene molded into a wavy form, or sculpt one from a putty or Green Stuff.  I've messed around with sheet styrene for other projects, but never tried to mold it into a cape before, but the size of the rhino made it to where doing a batch of green stuff would be a Herculean task and use up all of my GS, so I got out the thin styrene and set to work.

First step was to cut out a template. I cut a rectangle of card stock out and kept trimming it until it fit what I was trying to do, then I traced the card stock on a thin sheet of styrene (.2mm).

 

From there, the nerve wracking part began. I set the cape outline on top of a few different paint brushes, and set a few other weighted things on top of the styrene between the brushes. I then got my trusty Martha Stewart heat gun out and began blasting the cape with hot air. The idea is that the cape would sink where things sat on it, and wrap around the things under it, to create "waves." I certainly didn't want to over do it, and with the styrene being so thin, its pretty easy to make a big puddle of plastic, so I kept the heat gun really far off and was patient, took my time, and eventually got this:

 

 

Happy enough with the result, I sprayed some Tamiya metallic red on the cape so it would have a velvet-y sheen (the metallic red isn't very metallic looking, really just looks more like spandex). 

 

From there, I just applied some 5 minute epoxy to the cape on the shoulders, and added a tassel around it so the cape didn't appear to be growing out of his shoulders, and voila!

This will be the last update. All I have left is to find a base to go with the frame I got for the original drawing my son did and join them together, then get some pro-style shots and its over!