Han Solo Munny in carbonite

Ok, I made this custom munny back in 2009 for the local gallery show and posted pics on flickr... but, i decided to put them on my blog as well.

I know there are million custom munny and dunny pieces out there but i thought mine is unique enough to post the "partial" step by step progress of this project. I say "partial" since i didn't take pictures every step... the reason why is that my hands were pretty dirty from handling sculpey & magic-sculpt and didn't want to touch my camera. You actually don't need to use the Magic-sculpt... but i needed to make this in phases and didn't want to constantly re-bake the super sculpey over and over.

So here i go. I used 4-inch munny since it's small and easy to place in the polymer clay oven.

I bought a cheap wooden shadowbox frame (9"x6"x1.625") from the local craft store. Don't buy anything expensive. You need an unfinished shadow box frame. You're just using it as framework for this project - you want as plain as possible.


As you can see I simply removed his arms & head and mounted his body and head (a bit crooked) on the backing of the shadowbox. These body pieces are actually screwed onto the board to secure and make them steady.

You see other screws around this body - this is how i filled the rest without using a ton of super sculpey. i use wires and crumpled aluminum foils as a filler (see example).


Now it's filled. If i would have ONLY used the sculpey to fill the back, this piece would weighed a ton more! If you read the baking instruction it will say something about how thick it should be and how long. I never used that much sculpey as a solid mass, i wouldn't know how long it would take time to bake. I don't like a lot of unknowns... i went for the safest way.

I hear some people are not a big fan of super sculpey and would rather use polymer clay such as Original sculpey , sculpey III, or Premo!.. but I've had the best luck with super sculpey. I would stick with this product until i have to use the other one for whatever the reason.

FYI, at this point everything is still soft and flexible, try not to touch the back fill. I added more super sculpey to its body & face and started to sculpt. Once the polymer clay is baked it will be cured and hardened. Then you can sand, drill, carve, and painted. Having said that, i would sculpt and make the details as much as possible before baking. You can re-touch and re-adjust as your heart desires while it's still soft. I really think it's much easier to do this now than using Dremel with fine carving/drilling tools later.



Here is the close-up of Han Solo's face.



...and another view - from the bottom.



...and one more view. It's ready to bake him good :)



When i took him out of the oven, i noticed one side of his nose was dented and deformed!!! I must have bumped his nose on the heating element when i was placing his inside. What a surprise!! I actually didn't want to re-bake the clay again, I decided to use Magic-Sculpt which is an air-dry, 2-part epoxy clay. I shaved the deformed portion and added the clay over the cured super sculpey. You just need to let it dry overnight.


Super sculpey does shrink a bit when it gets baked... so it did create hairline gaps between clay and wood frame. I used the magic-sculpt to fill the gaps.

I also shaved the outer edges of the wood frame so that it gives a bit of an angle. Filed & sanded so that i can add and build the side control panels.




I got ahold of a tiny light assembly from a greeting card. Once it's activated, these lights start flashing and goes quicker & quicker... then it stops. Well this is perfect for this project. Just like when Boussh (Princess Liea's disguised as a bounty hunter) pressed the button to release Han from the carbonite freeze, it flashes and gets faster and faster. The carbonate melt away (very cheezy scene i must say) then Han falls on the floor.



I really didn't spend that much time building the side control panels. I used super sculpey to build 8 similar control panel facing plates and used magic-sculpt to put them on the side frame. As you can see, the top right control panel is slightly different. I placed a thin white plastic sheet first and drilled/chiseled the frame from the back so that i can insert the these lights.



This is after i sprayed a primer and a few additional layer of preparation. I wanted to have the different texture from the frame, so I put some liquitex gesso and some modeling paste. Now to the final paint.



I found a can of spray that mimics the hammered look. It's called Rust-O-leum "Hammered Spray". I did some test spray and it looked great. This is exactly what i was looking for. I'm not a big fan of mixing different brands of spray, but i don't think Krylon offered the similar spray.



Everything looks great but I added highlights... well, darken the crevices by painting very watered-down black liquitex acrylic paint and wipe the area with a paper towel. This will leave the paint in the crevices. You can spray the fixer, but I kept it as is.

That's it!!!