Build: The beauty of the Sea

Learning to scale - the hard way

Now I got a basic plan, but it was very rough. I did start with cutting the Ping Pong ball in half and then do the wagon that is carried. I had the video game Another Crabs treasure as reference in mind. There the sea is stuffed with tins and cans.

First I thought about using a coca cola can, cut in half, but discarded it. I wanted the astronaut-diver sit on the wagon - how to achieve that? On a coke can I’d have to build some seating. But then I came up with a tin of sardines. The old ones have such a unique opening lever with the cover rolled up. That could make a seat. Let’s go.

The cart defines the scale

Plastic card and a lemonade can where the materials to build. The can is hard to cut clean, but on the other hand you can easily bend it. I kept it roughly at the size of the Ping-Pong-jellyfish big enough to carry stuff but small enough to be pulled from it.

The rolled up cover was just the metal can rolled up with a toothpick and a handle from a paper clip.
And that decision fixed the scale - to an odd factor of 0.65 compared to a real sardine can.

I was happy with the cart but only later I found that it meant to scale ALL other items to the factor of 0.65. In the planning phase, I just thought I could collect some stuff, add it and call it a day. Sure that works for some items that exist in various sizes like buttons or screws. But all the things that have a defined size must be scratch build

The miraculous transformation from Astronaut to diver

The little guy required repositioning of the legs. And these were quite fiddly. One leg broke in pieces so that it was replaced by a plastic rod. Fortunately he has quite short legs and nobody will notice.
To make him a diver I did two modifications. First he got some rings on the helmet from a plastic rod cut into slices. These make the viewing window from all sides, like in very antique diver suites.
Secondly the backpad was scratched with the knife so that it looks like oxygen cylinders.

Pimp my ride

While building and sketching I’m in constant re-evaluation mode of the whole setting. Especially about details and feasibility. It is traveling in sand right? That would never work with thin button wheels. Thus I used thicker ones and two per side, or even bigger ones that look like a tube lid.

What puzzled me for a long time was the question: How to connect the jelly fish to the cart? It needs a kind of a handle. And that must somehow be connected to the cart.
I built the spring of a clothespin in 0.65 scale and attached it to a nail. looked quite sweet, but still I didn’t have any idea yet how to connect the nail to the cart so that it looked feasible and not just glued. But that was something for later.

The poor little guy looked very uncomfortable when sitting on the bare metal. It took me quite some time to come up with a proper idea that is on one hand feasible and secondly easy to implement. Finally he received a comfortable seat made out of foam. Foam is part of the sea anyway and doesn’t need any scaling

Set up the Garbage Ocean

Wagon and Astronaut done, it’s time to create a selling setting.
An old CA glue tube made a perfect downscaled toothpaste. Some screws were used as a dummy for future garbage.The size of the scene was determined by the cart and jelly fish. It should fit both without too much overhead.

“There should be no ‘dead’ space, i.e. empty space, without any interest or function”

– Marijn van Gils

The ocean scene received styrofoam mountains that were refined step by step and the “garbage collection” increased.

I found a small key and micro chip that fit without scaling. Then I built some items in scale which was partially nasty plasticcard work - I’m looking at you - USB connector…

A LED:

lid of a can from plastic card,

a ladder to enter built from waterdispenser parts,

A ring, a french fries fork,

and a snail shell from last summer vacation. In the final version it got replaced by a shell from my fish tank, again for scaling reasons.

• I had a huge collection of possible garbage, but most were just too hard to scale down or even too big after scaling:
• Cans ( even partial d=53mm / In scale 34,5mm just as sample)
• Shoes
• Glasses
• Food Plastic like Yoghurt caps
• Pens
• bulbs
• Tweezers
• Oil cans
• Tires
• Forks / spoons

But Finally I even got the idea how to attach the nail to the cart. Cable tie ends! Properly attached they look like they’re drilled through the cart end even don’t need any scaling (-:

The most funny and last idea was a cut out from a pill blister made of Googly eyes.
After testing around with proper placements, the scene was filled with modeling clay and paste, the sides were covered and I could continue with the jelly fish.

The Magic of UV resin

And now it got really fiddly. The ping pong ball is a god basis, but a jelly fish is not just half a circle. It is longer and more - well - organic?
That’s why an extension was needed. I found a thin wire mesh in the garage, that I often use to build 32mm fences. It was cut in shape and together with thin copper wires that should mimic thin tentacles and were attached to the inside of the ball.

Imagine doing that with super glue: “Nothing holds or cures in place, glue everywhere, fingers sticking together …”. And that’s where the UV resin showed it’s magic! Just a tiny drop inside the ball, the mesh in place and a few 5 seconds with the lamp to fix everything. the same for the individual wires.
Then, when everything was in place, the inside is covered in thinner layers to cover the mesh and make everything sturdy.

As amazing as the resin is, the outer “skin” of the jellyfish required manual modeling. The fluid resin doesn’t allow proper shaping and here some control is needed to get the tentacles integrated.
I’m definitely not good at working with putty and the whole surface was very rough when finished.

With careful sanding it turned out somehow OK. In a close look you see scratches, nubs and crannies here and there. But I’m happy that it is identifiable as jelly fish.

Make it steady

The very last piece ( beside some more little garbage elements ) is a big center tentacle set. The small wire tentacles make the whole thing quite wobbly. And some of the jelly fish reference have a bigger center thing. That should work to make it steady and attach it to the cart. So I grabbed some bigger wire and twisted it with 3 branches.

Then covered everything in green stuff so that it’s a bit flexible in positioning and finally attached it to the output element of the water dispenser. It won’t be visible, but is a great area to attach the ping pong ball and not worry of falling appart.

And that’s most of the building process. The highlight - Zenithal primed scene - will be excluded on purpose from this post. See it as primer to read the “paint” part in near future. And this one got to long anyway - thanks for your patience (-: