This little critter was featured in "Star Trek II, The Wrath of Khan". This is a resin casting of a foam hero creature used in the film.

I probably spent about 4 hours total on preparation, and 30 minutes doing the actual painting.

I first spent a couple of nights picking out all of the bubbles with an exacto knife. This was a pretty time consuming process because there were a LOT of little bubbles. To be more precise, there were a lot of little "spheres" of resin that were created from the bubbles that were in the molding rubber. I assume that this was somehow a result of the fact that this was molded from a foam master. After picking all of the little spheres out of all of the little nooks and crannies, I primered it with Plasti-Kote black spray primer. This is a really solid laquer based paint that is quite tenacious. For the actual painting of the wee beastie, I used some really inexpensive acrylic paint that was probably purchased from a craft store such as Michaels. From examining screen caps from the movie, I learned that the body was multiple shades of brown, while the exoskeleton part was grey. In the movie, the critter is seen scurring about in a jar of sand, so I figured that the screen used one was covered in sand dust and gunk, an probably gave it a nice washed out look. My goal was to reproduce that. I went at it with a really wet brush and painted the exoskeleton a really dark grey, with a TINY tint of mars blue. I followed that with a dark brown on the legs and head. While the paint was still wet, I did some wet-brushing in the areas where the exoskeleton met the "fleshy" parts. I wanted there to be a smooth but short transition between the scales and the skin. Once the base coats were done, I started in with a dry brush technique on the exoskeleton. I used what was left of my dark grey mix and dabbed in a bunch of white to lighten it up, and liberally dry brushed the chiton. Then I lightened the grey a bit more, and dry brushed a little less liberally, and avoided the deeper chasms in the chitonous armor. I continued like this through about 6 different lightnesses of grey, each one getting lighter as I went along. By the time I was at the point where I was only dry brushing the very tips of the chiton, the paint was a very pale grey. I then repeated this process in brown on the body parts. Lastly, the eyes were done using Ral Partha miniature paints. Because of the black undercoat, I needed a really opaque yellow to cover up the primer, and the Micheals paint wasn't going to cut it. I started in with a thick ring of wet orangie-red paint around the outer edge of the eyes, and while it was still wet, I brushed in some progressively lighter yellow. Continuing to use this wet-brush technique, I lightened the yellow again and again as I got closer to the center of the eye, all the while drawing in the red from the edges as I went. After that dried, I again used Ral Partha paint for the slits. I have not yet hit it with a Krylon Matte Finish, though I plan to.