Escape Hatch Hobbies "Hey Mom! Look!!"
Here's a very nice kit from Escape Hatch Hobbies that has a very nice line of original kits along with “add-ons” you can purchase to change an existing model kit such as Dr. Jeykle/Mr. Hyde into The Tingler with Vincent Price. The aforementioned “Tingler” build can be seen else whereo n this site (https://www.oneeffgeof.com/426262617/448898750)
This kit is one of the cleanest castings I have ever seen with nary a seam line or micro-bubble in sight. The scene is of a young boy frightening his mother with a mask he made of some sort of alien. The premise of the kit is based on an actual make-up artist book from the 60's called“Do-It-Yourself Monster Make Up Handbook”.
Assembly is pretty straight forward and the kit is designed so that you can place eachelement just about anywhere on the base. The mini versions of the Wolfman and Frankenstein's monster are excellent miniature copies of the Aurora kits that came out in the early 60's, both of which I have in my model collection. If I had a gripe about the kit is that the floor is a bunch of wide boards that just doesn't capture the look of a small boy's bedroom in my view.
Painting the kit is most time consuming part of the build. I went with a medium brown for the floor along with painting the nail heads steel. Mom's dress was a medium pink with flat white band around the neck and body. The belt was painted a gloss white with a touch of brass for the buckle.
Promo art for the kit
The “kid” was fairly easy and I pretty much copied the promo colors such as bluejeans, white tee shirt, yellow for the helmet and so on. I made some changes with the shirt by adding a star roundel for the front. I also added a black and red striped decal on the helmet. I did this because I accidentally got some glue on the helmet's clear visor which ruined it. I didn't really care for this part which I wasn't going using in any case. I lightly applied some pink makeup on this arms to give asun burned look. Finally, I used strands of butchers twine for his sneaker laces.
Additions I made to the kit was to use a Z scale army tank with matched the scale of the scene perfectly. I also downloaded a movie poster of the Wolfman and Frankie duking it out on the poster. I resized the poster on my word processor and glued it to a piece of cardboard with I attached it to back side of the bureau. I also made a rug of sorts from a small piece of cloth to at least cover some of the aforementioned wood flooring.
This kit is pretty simple although I spent more time on it than I had anticipated. Getting crisp lines such as where 'Mom's' shoe met her feet or the edge of where the rubber part on the sneaker made contact may have something to do with it. 10/26/2024