Mountain King's Chipped Pearl Mani-Pedi

Another change I decided to make to the Mountain King was to replace all his finger and toe nails with real chipped pearl.

The other thing I'll show off here is using a Dremel to make the process easier.

You can see an example here of how it looks when I finished.

I had considered replacing his teeth with stones, but that was looking a little logistically crazy and to be honest, I liked how his teeth looked. While rooting through my terrain bits I came across the pearl chips and it all came together.

You can also carve the nails out with a knife, but a rotary tool is just tons easier and faster.

I've left this photo here just as an example of how the nails looked before I started.

This is my rotary tool, a Dremel that TheWife bought me to finally replace the one lost in our flood and the cheap garage sale one I'd been using since.

A few features:

• Cordless
• Still has the torque (strength) of the plugged in model and portable.
• Battery charges really fast, but a second can be purchased for uninterrupted extended work.
• Flex-Shaft Attachment [link]
• This is a light-weight extension with flexible tubing that lets you easily work on smaller detail while hanging the heavier Dremel out of the way.
• Normally a rotary tool is just the large part hanging in the top right of the picture here. Non-Dremel brand tools may not have this available.
• Bits
• There are all sorts and sizes of bits available. Often you're working with grinding, sanding or cutting.

* My favourite attachment is the fibreglass reinforced cutting wheel. That thing is great for everything from cutting slots in stripped screws to grinding through metal.

I started with a larger grinding bit to cut off the nails and create the rough shape of the hole, then moved to a smaller bit to add definition.

Finally, a knife is a good way to clean up anyone roughness left by the grinding.


Then I dumped out some of my pearl chips and tried fitting them to the missing nails.

As I found ones that fit, I used green stuff to fill the gap and sculpt it into the fingers.

Below, you can see all the chipped pearls. I didn't glue them into place until after priming and airbrushing, so I marked underneath them as to where they go.