BECAUSE – Tiny Bucky Life

So I broke the saucer for my only antique teacup doing something stupid and while the piece was only moderately valuable it was a piece that had some sentimental value to me. I had bought the piece (for quite a low price) as a form of memorabilia for the film Crimson Peak which I love a great deal. This teacup and saucer were almost the exact same as the ones used in the movie. I hunted down this piece with only vague excerpts from Google to guide my way. At some point I hope to own the teapot and possibly a few other pieces.

I wasn’t going to throw the pieces out. For one thing I felt it would be really wasteful and for another I was pretty sure I could repair it. Definitely not to the point of it being unnoticeable but at least to the point of being a whole piece again. A few people suggested Kintsugi (a Japanese method of repairing broken pottery with metallic, most often gold, powder mixed with lacquer) and while I do find the technique very beautiful I thought it would not work so well on this as it already has a great deal of gold artwork already on it so the fine lines of gold repairwork would be lost and confuse the pre-existing patterns.

I used gardening gloves to handle the broken pieces so I didn’t cut myself and used a gel type superglue as I wanted the repair lines to be slightly raised and have some texture.

I didn’t do a great job repairing. I was a bit impatient and put the pieces together in the wrong order so the end result was a but wonky and had large gaps. I had a few issues with accidentally glueing my gloves to the pieces too! I also ended up using a filter mask because I was not prepared for how strong the superglue fumes would be.

I decided to fill in the more prominent gaps with Apoxie Sculpt just because I had some on hand and wanted to make the repair lines more raised.

I ended up using a small dotting tool and an awl to sort of shape the lines. The good things about apoxie sculpt is that it will smooth out with water.

Now came time to paint it. And at this point one would expect me to break out the gold paint. Instead here is Tamiya Clear Red paint and some fine brushes I have.

This took… so damn long to paint. I had to use even finer brushes to paint just the fine cracked lines.

SURPRISE IT’S RED! And you probably guessed what look I’m aiming for (also it’s in the title) and I decided to make it look like the saucer was bleeding or “repaired with blood” because I thought the red would stand out and also it calls back to Crimson Peak and its numerous horrors. Some would probably think this is tacky or I’ve “ruined it” but I had already ruined it by breaking it and it’s for a horror movie tribute and it’s mine so 😛

The red was all wrong though so I broke out the Tamiya Smoke: a translucent grey paint.