Have you ever seen an advert for a model in a magazine and thought that looks nice, I think I'll get one of those?
Well be warned because this is what can happen to you if you do.
I saw an ad for this 1/9 Alien Queen by a company called Terran Trader in our UK modelling Bible Model Mart.

The original Box

It was nearly $280 but I had a trade account with a supplier so I could get it for about $190. It was still a lot of money but....
So I ordered it up the year before last. I waited and waited 'till about March '00 and finally rang up to cancel, only to find out that it had arrived at the suppliers, so I wait another week for our UK Postal Service to get it to me and guess what. When it finally arrives it's the biggest load of crap I have ever seen.
It was big but that was the only thing going for it. It was one of those kits for experienced modellers only, if you know what I mean. Bad sculpt, bad cast, cheap resin, appaling detail etc.etc.
So what do I do with it? First off I threw it into a corner of the tip I call a studio for 6 months. Then after I had calmed down I purchased an old Halcyon Alien Queen as reference and completely rebuilt the thing.
I started with the head which was a lousy imitation of the Halcyon one.
It was the wrong shape all the detail (not the best word to use here) either inaccurate or in the wrong place, it all had to be sanded off. During this process I set up my next project. Angle Grinder Resurrection.........! Don't use one on large lumps of resin, it may be fast but the dust gets in the motor and burns it out!
So I went with plan B, a grinding stone attached to a drill. This creates an enormous amount of white powder so if you ever try this, do get a full face gas mask with a carbon filter. Resin powder in the lungs is carcinogenic (not healthy), and even though I did this outside, protected by the mask, it left the front door and yard looking like a cute Christmas card picture.
Back inside I slowly and painstakingly rebuilt the head using Milliput. For those of you familiar with this substance you'll know that it has a set time of 2-3 hours unless you use a secret weapon like a central heating radiator or in my case the Rayburn. This speeds the set time up to about an hour. Very useful in preventing your intricate fresh detail from being smeared all over your pants 'cause you didn't check wether it was still soft or not.
The best way I've found of manipulating this putty is by liberal use of water and an old stiff brush. You place lumps where you want to create some detail, shape it with a Dental tool or scalpel and finally smooth and blend it it with the water and brush. This process is repeated as many times as needed until you have it the way you want it and then it is placed on your heat source to harden. Sounds simple doesn't it? Hmmmm.
Another trick I discovered was to use an air drying acrylic for the detail on the underside of the head. You can get this stuff from Hobby shops. It's made for simulating the lead ridges in between colours in glass painting. It comes in a tube and you squeeze it out in lines to make the ridges which can then have Milliput worked over them for the final effect.



Once the head was complete I rebuilt the mouth. One of the bonuses of having made so many white metal dragons is that I have a large collection of spare arms, heads, teeth etc. So all the dental work was white metal shaped with a hobby drill. This made the mouth look much fiercer than the toothless trout I was originally supplied with.



After the head came the torso. The neck on this part was awful rather like Jabba the Hut, so I went back outside and sanded all the air bubbled ridges off and re-detailed it with the Milliput to something resembling the Halcyon one. The tail I left more or less intact apart from cleaning all the extra resin out of each joint and bending it in boiling water. It wasn't worth the effort getting it like my reference version and anyway it snapped 4 times as I bent it and I had to pin it in sections.
By now you must be thinking that I must be some kind of masochistic pervert inflicting all this pain on myself? No, not really, I am just tight and can't bear throwing something away that cost me so much money!
After the tail came the legs. No doubt you are familiar with the film Mrs Doubtfire?
Well these legs would not have been out of place gracing him. The legs on the original are really thin and in all honesty would collapse under the weight of a real monster like the Alien Queen. So how do you get round that? The best way I know is to put a metal armature all the way up each leg. To do this I had to route out a channel on the inside of the leg, through the foot, all the way up to the locating lump that attaches the leg into the body then bend a mild steel rod into the right shape to drop into the hole. This was really difficult as the rod has to be tough enough to take the weight yet malleable enough to bend into the right shape. Not funny....



Once this was done on both legs I chopped out 2 sections of resin just after what I suppose was each knee so I could drop a bolt section in to simulate the ridged tubing. To finish each leg then just took patience with the Milliput. Personally I found the hardest part of this being getting both legs to be a mirror image of each other. Copying one from the Halcyon kit was relatively easy but getting the one you have just finished to look like the first one..........!
Once both legs were done I put a base together from bits of my old car's automatic transmission and odds and sods of junk I have collected over years. The idea being to create something from the 4th film rather than the second. In the second film all the action involving the Queen happens on grating floor sections which are not easy to reproduce where as in the 4th it happens in a waste tank which is never really shown in detail. When in doubt use artistic license!



The beauty of using old aluminium sections as a base is that it will take the weight of something as big as this, whilst remaining light itself. All the goo and Alien excretia are made with Chemical Metal (hard setting car filler). You mix it up and drape it across the surface covering all the dodgy joints, out of scale lettering and any thing else you wish to hide.
With a nice solid base completed I located the legs into the body added the tail and stuck the whole assembly together with epoxy glue. This left the two sets of arms and the gill/spikes to build. The hands supplied were AWFUL white metal castings. The little ones had 3 fingers instead of 5 and the big ones looked like inflated rubber gloves! I knew I'd have to build the main 6 fingered hands from scratch and decided to convert the little ones by adding the extra fingers.
This may have been a mistake as I think these hands do let the final figure down especially the right one as the thumb still doesn't look right. However the little white metal ones were the ones I went with so I was stuck with them. Once I had added the extra 2 fingers, made out of panel pins, I attached the hands to the arms and put in bolt sections where needed and completed the detailing with Milliput. Funny thing is that when they were attached to the torso the creature looked like some kind of mutant chicken especially before the head was bolted on.



The spiky gilled things were relatively easy to make with ground and shaped Milliput and were fixed onto the body with metal pins. This left the main arms and the scratch built hands. To do these I drew out a template to scale from the Halcyon Kit so I could get the fingers in scale. These were made from thin nails bent to shape and then glued together with activator hardened superglue. Once I had the basic hand shape right I skinned it with Milliput and used a fine drill on the fingers for the knuckle/ joint detailing. The rest of the arm was created with the Milliput apart from the little ridged tube things. These were oil filter seals from a car stuck on with super glue. All I had to then was reproduce the other arm to match the one I had already done, fix them both in place and I was finished.
Finished ha ha! It had taken me over a month to get this far!
The best thing about Alien figures is the paint job. It is so simple. Black sprayed base coat. Dry brushed detail with violet and blue Liquitex interference colours. Then a final coat of liquid acrylic through an airbrush. Silver teeth and interference blue finger and toe nails.
Done.
The base had extra green and brown washes with the egg mouth painted raw sienna/flesh. To make the base extra slimy I dribbled cellulose dope over parts of it and put some around the mouth of the egg. After this I lacquered the whole thing with acrylic lacquer and waited. Lucky for me the cellulose dope reacted with the lacquer and went all bubbly.
And that was that, another month of my life gone by.

Click the thumbnails for a better image