Halloween Nightmares' The Bog Monster

The 'box art for this kit though it doesn't come in a illustrated box.

This resin kit is another of Garage Kits US Halloween Nightmares series called “The Bog Monster”. As you can see, what is essentially the Creature From The Black Lagoon (though they can't call it that for licensing reasons) is attempting to liberate a determined little pirate's and his trusty pug from his recently acquired Halloween loot.

I can't say enough nice things about this kit and the HN line in general. The castings are superb! No seam lines, no bubbles, no voids to deal with EVER. The detail is amazing and I can't imagine how they mange to pack so much stuff in their scenes. As with the other kits in the line, this fits together with the others to create a single scene of Halloween mayhem with famous monsters versus little kids fighting back.

This kit is probably the most complicated and for that reason, the most difficult to build. All the individual elements are physically tied together so placement is crucial. I had to move my Bog Monster back a bit so that the torn pillow case, pirate boy and pug would all fit correctly on the base. The company provides a very nice tutorial primarily describing the painting process along with loads of great pictures that will help in the construction of this model kit. This link will get you there: https://garagekitsuscolors.com/halloween-nightmares-bog-monster.html

A lot of pinning is required to hold this kit together. Up until now, I had been relying on finishing nails or cut up wire coat hangers as pins but because the parts are so delicate, I had to come up with another less coarse pin replacement. I found it in, of all places, my electric nail gun. The nails themselves are roughly half the diameter of a pencil lead and boy are they tough! I keep a cartridge of nails near my work area and when I need one, I break one off with a pair of needle nose pliers, trim off the nail head with wire cutters and I'm good to go. Using my mini-power tool, I drill a 3/64” hole in each end of the parts to be mated and glue with CA or two part epoxy. Be sure to check alignment before gluing!

Like the tutorial shows, I made a fake sword to add the the scene from a piece of scrap from my 3D printer. Using two part epoxy clay, I fashioned a small piece of “rope” and looped it over the sword at his hip and blended it into place.

I also added more sea weed around the manhole by staining some craft store peat moss green and fixing it in place with clear Elmer's glue.

I won't go into how I painted this build since I would leave that to the individual modeler. The aforementioned tutorial provides many great painting tips although the Gill Man came out a bit too yellow for my taste but that's just me. The most tedious and time consuming part (in my view) is painting the candy because there must be one hundred pieces in the entire display. My only recommendation would be to stick with one color before moving on to the next. This might seem obvious but remember that the Bog Monster has candy in its hand, there's candy in the pillow and strewn al over the street scene.

As stated, this is a great kit but I would hesitate recommending it for the beginner mostly because of the precise part placement. The kit is more expensive than most but well worth it and would certainly draw a lot of attention on your display shelf. 4/30/2020