Meet Officer Coleman

et us start by saying we've never made a resin model before, and our painting experience is limited to a few miniatures and some parking lot lines.

We chose to fill our diorama base with wax in order to save time. Plaster of paris needs 48 hours to dry, and melted wax is a little easier to work with. The base is filled from a hole in the bottom, so it must be filled upside-down. Since the top of the base is quite uneven, it was rather difficult to keep it level, and we ended up using books and soup cans to prop the whole thing up while the wax hardened.

The gluing-together stage was quite easy. We even managed to get our Martian to stand up on his own. We could not make the tubes meet the jet pack properly, however, despite breaking them off for a second try after the first gluing went awry. The tubes are made of resin, not the easily-workable vinyl, so how they can be made to fit is a mystery to us.

As mentioned, painting the vinyl is easy. Painting the resin is not. While base coating the vinyl street took 10 minutes, the mostly-resin Martian took about an hour and a half to complete. We chose a purple base for the guts (with pink highlights). Coleman's hair, you'll notice, is the same color as the dog's. Well, they say people come to look like their pets. For the Martian's head we made the mouth tentacles purple, as recommended by Screamin', but only dry brushed the brain green without base coating first, so that the crevices would glow through.

Then came our greatest disappointment. The helmet doesn't fit over the Martian's head! It could be forced, but that's bound to scrape off some paint, and we worked way too hard getting it on there. So we left the helmet off.

When you look at the finished model, keep in mind that not all art is beautiful.

ack to Other Cool Sci-Fi Stuff.