A woolly tornado

Next up was shaping the “twisting wind” into the cotton. I started at the bottom and worked my why up at an angle. Slight turning it as I went. I stuck it to a breakfast turntable with poster tag for that to help. Turned out some parts didn’t properly stick to the bandage… Not wanting to wait a night. I risked using super glue. It worked. Just glad didn’t do that with the complete tornado.

When I was at the top, it felt a bit… blend there. So I added a circle of cotton on top to bulk it out.

Now the difficult part came. I have done some small things out of  cotton wool. But didn’t really know how to stiffen this up properly so it would stand up to play, transport, etc. I asked around on Facebook with the photo above.

First is sprayed hairspray, starting from below. As I wanted the rims up, not down. Then I used very VERY thinned down coats of PVA through a airbrush. I followed the paths I had made at about 0.6 /0.8Bar and distance spraying at 1 bar. Any less and my mixture of PVA was just to heavy, even with flow aids.

After that I went into quick clean mode after each layer. As I still wanted to use my airbrush! Plenty of luck warm water, with a bit of dishwater and even some cleaner. ( 4 times I did this)

It had worked and now it was on to painting! I had been watching YouTube videos. But couldn’t decide between, mude/sand, grey/blueish or fire tornado as they all looked dangerous! I went for a bit of a mixture.

I used Vallejo wash Grey as a base colour in the paths to darken them up, airbrush of course.(0.5 bar ish) Followed by a thin line of black wash (0.2 Bars). Also spotted these colours into any crevasses.

I picked a few spots to do with bluegrey, representing the blue of the sky reflecting of the tornado. And finished with a very thinned down Vallejo grey primer, trying to let some white remain on the outer edges.

Only thing left was to texture up the base. I used liquid super glue for that to “draw” lines in a pattern. Which I then applied fine grained sand on. Where needed I repeated this to increase the height. (There are smarter ways…) A bit of watered down PVA in between the lines and some more sand to finish the base texture of.

Next day I grabbed the airbrush and based the base in armour brown. Colouring the wind ridges in; sand brown and sand yellow. All these colours also went into the bottom of the tornado, as you can see. Now it’s done!