Making spare parts for a head

As I recently posted, I have two very broken raptor figures I want to fix. Here's making replacements for most of the tigerstripe raptor's head.

I've trimmed away the bits of plastic that were beyond saving, to leave a cleaner canvas to start adding things onto. I'm keeping some of the head, but the snout and more than half of the lower jaw is gone. Luckily I found a convenient niche in the jaw stump, which can fit a support wire.

With 1mm aluminum wire as armature, I sculpted a replacement part for the rest of the lower jaw using bakeable polymer clay.

For the insides of the mouth, I used a similar approach as with Skye's figure, making separately two pink flaps of clay with teeth stuck onto them that I'll attach to the outside bits. Unlike with Skye, I didn't bake the teeth first. Skye is a lot smaller, so it was necessary for her figure so I wouldn't squish the teeth while working on them, but this way works too when the mouth I need to make has more room in it for sculpting tools.

Then I attached to the lower jaw's mouth piece (yes, it's the same as above - different lighting) a tongue and some darker red clay at the throat. The tongue is the last one of the four I made while working on Swiftdive and Treeclimber. Nothing wrong with it, it was just too wide for those figures, but fits in this mouth just fine. Good thing I kept it.

Trying on the lower jaw bits. Looks good, all things considered.

Then I made the lower lip. Fitting the lower jaw pieces together is going to be tricky, but the lip only needs to line up with the inside of the mouth perfectly, so I sculpted it onto that piece. I used white clay mixed with mint green and black clay mixed with a bit of brown. Singer has some pretty complicated lower lip markings, and I'd rather not try to fit a paintbrush between the lip and teeth to paint those on the inside of the lip if I can avoid it, so I'm making the lip with polymer clay that's already in the right colours and won't need painting.

It was pretty delicate work, so I baked what I'd made about halfway through the job before continuing, to save my progress so to say. It's tiny pieces and snakes of clay stuck to the mouth piece using liquid polymer clay as glue.

I also added a bit of aluminum foil filling to the jaw piece, and a thin layer of clay to keep it in place. Leaving it hollow felt like it would be too fragile.

Then to the upper jaw. I made a snout out of more polymer clay with foil as filler. The scale texture is done with a plastic-coated paperclip with the plastic slid off one end a bit to create a small, circular stamp. There's also some texture from gently rolling the snout along the surface of a lemon juice bottle that's designed to look like a lemon, complete with a lemony texture. The nostrils are made with a darning needle.

After some more precise measurements and taking into account that the palate piece will add about 1mm of thickness, I trimmed down the bottom of the snout.

And then attached the palate, which has also been trimmed a bit towards the throat. I put a very thin slice of raw polymer clay with liquid clay on each side between the snout and palate, and baked it. The clay slice is there to attach it more snugly, as the pieces aren't completely smooth on the surfaces that go together.

Then I widened the snout a bit towards the mouth, creating a surface for the upper lip to be attached to.

Another fitting.

The lip took three bakings, for the same reason as the lower lip took two, but now it's done. I used more of the white+mint clay, and orange clay that I mixed as close to the colour of the figure as I could get, to again minimize having to paint any insides of the lip. The rest of the snout is made with a light grey clay that I'll paint later.

And boop. We'll make a dinosaur out of you yet.

I've been using Dare's figure as reference for this reconstruction, and one thing you might notice from the above photo that our poor boy is also missing on that side is the bit behind the eye.

I used black clay for the inside surface of the piece, with a bit of foil for added strength, and after baking that I added more of the orange clay onto the outside surface, textured again with the paperclip stamp.

And let's not forget the eyes. The right one is mostly salvageable, of which I'm glad because I really want to keep at least a bit of the figure's original eye paint. The left one needs replacing, though. Here are four I made, and I went with the one that's on the left by itself. I'll paint it to match the other eye, but leave a thin line unpainted around the pupil. It's glow-in-the-dark clay. :)

Now I still need to put all of this together.