[Michael Smith]

I made a lot of progress tonight on a prop I'm pretty excited about: my radioactive bone pit.

The idea I'm going for is that a glob of radioactive waste has cracked through the crust and burbled to the surface, carrying with it the irradiated bones of some poor bastard. There will be a flourescent FCG hovering over it as the unquiet, nuclear spirit. I'm basically using the glowing coals idea but making it green and radioactive instead of red and firey.

Here's the current state:

You can see the in-progress photos here (I'll do my best to keep this album up to date, as well as this thread).

 

[Spanishtulip]

That looks very disturbing....

great job

radioactivity has always freaked me out, maybe it was growing up near a nuclear plant...

 

[Regions Beyond]

Great 'goopy' texture and forms so far, really love it. Look forward to seeing the end result and progress along the way!

 

[captpete]

I like your twist on the fire pit. One of the Gemmy fire and ice green lights would make a good background for the scene.
Pete

 

[DeadED]

Cool I was thinking of something like that for next year's Fallout theme

 

[DarkhavenManor]

Wow, really creative! You should spatter the FCG with some green blacklight paint to help him match the waste

 

[Michael Smith]

My plan is slightly more elaborate than that (because I can't do anything the easy way, ask my girlfriend). I'm going to mix the UV paint with water and hang the ghost cloth over it with the edge trailing in it. It should creep up the fabric and give me a nice, kind of washy effect. I'll layer a few different colors that way. In my head, it'll look awesome with the UV light below the ghost. We'll see how it plays out...

 

[Trex]

It looks so wet and oozy, great job, love that effect!!

 

[lawrie]

You could make an awesome fake neon radioactive waste sign with EL wire to put nearby

 

[Ghost of Spookie]

Looks fabulously gross...ewwwwww.....Nice job and thanks for sharing.

 

[HaunterMom]

Great job! What did you use to make it look wet? Thanks!

 

[matrixmom]

Make sure you try it out with lights, I did one similar and had to buy green string lights for underneath. Someplace were too dark with paint for mine. But your color /faux painting looks fantastic.

 

[Rustie]

That's looking great! Really fantastic paint job!

 

[Michael Smith]

The wet look is actually because the paint was still wet when I took the photo. I attempted to replicate that last night with some spray-on lacquer, and... it didn't work very well. Turned the whole thing a bit greyish. I was able to recover with some more of the citrus green, but I'm debating whether to try to pursue that further. I got some good suggestions elsewhere for products to try on it (none of which was what I actually did try, naturally), so... maybe. We'll see.

It's also not holding up its shape without support, so I'll need to add some blocks to the underlying board to keep its dome shape.

 

[Greenwick]

Sounds like something to wait on, so you can see if the look grows on you or not.

 

[Michael Smith]

Make sure you try it out with lights, I did one similar and had to buy green string lights for underneath. Someplace were too dark with paint for mine. But your color /faux painting looks fantastic.

Aaand that's exactly what happened. Got the lights yesterday and tried it out, and they're barely visible. I'm going to try poking some unobtrusive holes in it to see if that helps, but I may have to redo it.

If it comes to that, I think I'll approach it with a slightly different understanding: the color's supposed to come from the light, the paint is just there as sort of like a mask.

 

[Michael Smith]

So this is what it looks like with the lights:

No, you don't need to adjust your monitor. Looks like I need to try again. I've managed to salvage the stones and bones, so I'm not starting from square one. More soon, once I get more Great Stuff...

 

[RikerVano]

Looks like HULK is desolated at last!!!

 

[matrixmom]

Michael is this with green lights?

 

[Michael Smith]

Yeah. Hard to tell, eh? You were right about using too much paint. Should be able to get attempt two together on Wednesday night, though.