Sprue Dude: The Sugilite Knight

Few weeks ago, I stumbled upon Phil’s blog and crafts. He’s making minis out of model kits sprues leftovers. I found this very cool, both for the challenge and for the principle.

Concept

After giving it a thought (and moving houses, which took a bit of time let’s be honest), I finally cleaned my craft desk and starting to work. Of all of his awesome models (of which, I encourage you, to check!), one was my favorite, by its simplicity and robo-esque design: the first and original Sprue Dude.

Of course, my design had to be one-eyed and robotic. This is the original drawing which ironically ended to be 1:1 scaled with the mini!

Keeping it simple, it would be a robot knight, brandishing his blade after (probably) a victory or just before a very bad encounter.

And this is what I should be working with. I don’t have a ton of model kits (mostly gunplas), nor did I kept most of the sprues.

The build

Like Phil, I started by gluing the feet to what would be my working cork. And this is the exact moment I realized “Oh my god this is small”. And small it was.

I struggled a lot with the torso. I wanted to have a wider piece than the pelvis, so I tried to glue together two pieces of sprue to sculpt, but nothing pleased me. I now respect even more what Phil is doing with his minis!

I ended using a leftover piece from a Gundam kit. Is this cheating? Probably. That was technically on my sprue at some point! Sorry Phil, I failed you.

Last but not least, this little injection mark was the perfect size and shape to make myself a nice little head.

Then came the sword, taken from a panel on the sprue. I kept the little dots as they would probably serve a design purpose.

As you can see, I struggled a lot with my glue, and I used a bit much of baking soda. I sanded most of it before painting.

I’m skipping the painting part as it wasn’t very interesting. White undercoat, and multiple coats of regular citadel paint.

Final model

The base was 3D-printed, the model comes from ecaroth on thingiverse. Is this cheating²? Maybe. I’m not even very proud of this part. Anyway. Please enjoy my little Sugilite Knight, crawling dungeons and fighting horrible monsters to save his kingdom!