Bob Byington
Winston-Salem, North Carolina
Even in HO scale (1/87), Bob’s scary scene is 22" wide, 18" deep, and 20" tall, not counting the monster’s tail. It’s a scene from the 1953 movie “The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms,” based on a short story by Ray Bradbury called “The Fog Horn.” The eight-piece resin model of the beast was sculpted by Jim Davidson of Fantamation Studio; Bob bought it at Monsters in Motion’s website. “I altered the model a tad,” he says. “The head was tilted in the wrong direction for me and I needed to have the beast rising and climbing up out of the ocean rather than walking straight on land.” Bob cut and repositioned the head, legs and feet, smoothing gaps with epoxy putty, carving it to match as needed. The island is Styrofoam covered in plaster wraps (he made boulders and such using Woodland Scenics molds) in a sea of Liquitex gloss heavy gel covered with a lot of Pledge Future floor polish. In fact, everything is covered in Future, “because I wanted it to look like it was all soaking wet from the ocean and pelting rain,” Bob says. He painted Faller’s Hornum Lighthouse after the lighthouse on Montauk Point, Long Island and scratchbuilt a foghorn from balsa and the top of a Bic ballpoint pen. “My father, who died in 1989, had a scratchbuilt O gauge model railroad he was always working on. I inherited his parts box and use pieces from it whenever I can,” Bob says.