LARP'in up an old plastic necklace

 Okay, so it's a heatwave, meaning it is way to warm to bend close to my painting lamps to work on some figures.

 

So I went rummaging through some boxes of old stuff, and found this little plastic tooth necklace from I guess 25 years ago.

 

Now, as I'm still slowly working on a LARP set, I thought it was the perfect thing to spend the time sheltering the heat and still be somehow productive.  

 

The first thing I did, bar finding a way to have it placed decently to work on, was undercoat it with some Payne's Grey acrylic paint from my Talens Amsterdam collection.

 

Next, the tooth part got a layer of Van Dyke Brown, again from the same range.  I really love this series of paints, as they are better then euro store craft paints, yet don't cost an arm and a leg, averaging around 2 euro for a small to 8 euro for the very big tubes... and I can do a LOT of wargame bases or 3d printed wargame terrain with them. 

 

The edge was then painted with Gunmetal Grey from my Vallejo wargame paints.  For these small projects or detailing on larger pieces, I dare using these in comparison expensive paints but hey...

 

I then did a coating of Ink Wash Armour from Coat D'Arms over the metal, to give it some depth.  These inks also require a while to dry, so that would allow me to paint the rest of the tooth first before rounding out the top part.

 

And the first colour added to the tooth was Vallejo's Game Colour Earth, a muddy dried earth style of colour and ideal to work up from, letting the dark brown show through at parts to give some depth.

 

Using more wargame paints, I took some Green Brown from Vallejo to make the intermediate layer from the browns going to the white touches.

 

Next, using some more Coat D'Arms paint, I went to draw lines with Bone, now using a smaller brush to do this.  This is basically the most important stage of the painting of the tooth, as this layer is what makes it look decent or rubbish.  I think it turned out alright though.

 

The metal part then got some highlighting as by now the ink had dried enough to do so.

 

So, time for the final stages of the painting.  Using Dead White, again from Vallejo, I drew some highlight lines into the bone lines, more towards the point of the tooth then near the top.

 

Finally, the last painting was some Dark Rust, again from Vallejo, to weather the metal part at the top to give it a bit of an old and worn look.

 

And that is it for the painting, now all I needed to do was using some matt varnish, again from my stack of craft store material and not wargame expensive varnish, and leave it out to all dry up.

 

And there we have it, an afternoon project of transforming a cheap plastic tooth to something that can be worn on a LARP costume, a simple yet fun project to do and spend some time on sheltering from the weather.  It did give the benefit thought the paint and inks dried a bit faster though...

 

Until the next time!