Kroack The Zombird - Sculpt by JL Crinon

The "box art" for this resin kit by JL Crinon

Here's another sculpt by JL Crinon that I purchased on eBay. It is a strange looking animal influenced, I suspect, by Tim Burton films but a little darker to be sure as hinted at by the disemboweled Teddy bears at its feet. .

As you may know, I like to personalize most of what I build and in this case I added a few things. One was that there were a pair of long strands of sprue extending from the birds head and down along its beak. Their purpose (I suspect) was to act as an air escape port to allow the beak to get properly filled with resin during the casting step. I cleaned them of flash and added a club (as it is called) to the end made of two part epoxy clay. Before it cured, I used the end of a ball point pen casing to make sucker impressions in the soft clay.

In the case of the Teddy bears, I painted their wounds in various shades of red and pink. Once this dried, I applied PVA glue to the areas that would normally be furry and then dusted them with brown ground foam. I did the same for the larger bear but I used fake snow for his snout. Their eyes are beads mounted on common pins.

The color palette is kinda random, again harkening to the Tim Burton “look” the overall sculpt suggests. The three tentacles coming out of the base were painted an iridescent purple with copper finger nail pin striping spiral. I added an eye ball to the end of the larger of the three.

The base is cadmium yellow with a wash of black to bring out the curlicues.

The zombie bird went through several iterations before I finally settled on a two shade approach for the body copying how vultures tend to look. The rear of the bird has a base coat of raw sienna with a wash of deep red and the front of the bird was a light gray with a wash of medium brown to accent the texture. I used Rub'N'Buff pewter for the metal wrapped legs with a wash of rust and dark gray to give a used appearance. The tentacles I added were a mix of pink and gray with the clubs in gray with a wash of pink. The feet and upper legs are a pumpkin brown washed in gray to enhance the scale affect in the sculpt.

This is a nice little kit that is fairly inexpensive and just odd enough to illicit comments from people that see it. Construction is very simple so it would be a nice beginner kit for the newbies out there. 12/15/20