Is this things still on?

Yes it’s still on! But with all the traveling and some life changes modeling has taken a back seat. This is not to say I haven’t done anything all this while, but when you’re not inspired you’re not inspired

I however find enough patience to repaint this incredibly awesome Knight of Skeleton statue that I bought - it’s insanely expensive (shipping is like $100) and I’ll probably never buy something like this again, but I just couldn’t resist the awesomeness of it. The prepaint job is not the best to put it moderately, putting very dull silver on the knight’s armor is just wasting the statue - the dude needs serious Alcladilization! Moreover the dark parts on the statue has no variations in ton - the drybrushing work wasn’t very good on it. Anyway I’m about half way through repainting the dude, will post pics when I’m done.

Aloha!

We went to Maui, Hawaii last week and it was a blast. It was a company trip, with some prior arrangements we got certified for scuba diving. The underwater scenery was fantastic. I also went on to a night dive but I figured there are too many things to worry about for a first-time night dive, so I didn’t bring a camera for that.

http://picasaweb.google.com/ctkwok/MauiHawaii112007

There are soooooo many thing to do and see in Maui, highly recommended!

I also went on a survival training trip in Peruvian Amazon before Hawaii, but need a bit longer to sort out the pics, so I’ll post them later. This site is definitely turning into a travel blog

Ireland pics

Posted some pics of the trip over at Google’s web album.

http://picasaweb.google.com/ctkwok/Ireland/

It was a pretty awesome trip and I really like working with the people over there. Folks are very friendly as well. Definitely worth visiting!

Travelmania

After the last trip (which was fantastic) I couldn’t sit still and off I go again! I’ll be traveling to Dublin, Ireland. Although it’s mostly for my work, I’m planning to do some tourist stuff over the weekend… and I’m going to Peruvian Amazon in November. More on that later; one trip at a time

Vacation!

Well what do you know, sometimes you’ve gotta

take a break from modelling! Actually I haven’t had any real vacation for ages, so I spent July tying up loose ends at work (and reading all 7 of Harry Potter books in one swoop), and will take August off (but will be back in time for the gkjapan’s contest… join now!). See y’all in September.

Attack of the grail kit part 7

After some weekend fight with this kit I’m feeling a bit unmotivated, so I’ll write some WIP instead

The first batch of glass didn’t work as well as I expected so I exchanged them for a couple of others. Shipping glass is expensive! Anyway I’ve gotten 2 new pieces back, one “aqua iridescent” and one “light blue iridescent”. It seems unless you go lighter on the stained glass it’s almost going to be opaque. I was kind of excited about the aqua color since it matches my background very well, but still stands out enough. So that was my preferred choice.

Then I went to have the pieces cut. Boy I felt stupid afterwards, it didn’t seem like my glass shop has any more sophisticated equipment that what I can buy myself, and the guy totally couldn’t get what I was trying to have him cut. That lead to pieces that were not perfect, while the labor was more than I expected to pay for 20 minutes of work.

Anyway I got an idea after the Kagura kit to simulate wavy water surfaces with clear resin. It worked so well for Kagura that it’s worth trying here. In the mean time I can also use the clear resin as glue to the glass frame.

Here’s round 1 of this process. I’ve laid the first resin layer down and am waiting for it to cure, and laid the 4 pieces of the glass frame down. The two sides of the glass have different properties, one with bumpy texture but lower iridescence, and the other side reverse. It was a hard choice but I went with the textured side. I had a hard time having the 4 corners of the frame be flush due partly to the imperfect cutting and partly to the non-flat plaque. May be I should install some corners for the frame to hide the imperfections. You can see a bit of the nice water surface on the right side of the plaque, it should look much nicer when I apply the successive resin layers. I’ll also have to work some clear resin underneath the frames in the next runs… since the plaque is not level, the glass pieces don’t touch the plaque completely and thus show some unsightly unevenness underneath.

Puru Puru Puru…

My usually busy June has kept me silent since I finished Cammy, but I’ve worked on and off on this Azumanga Daioh’s Kagura-san in school swimsuit, trying to finish her up in time for summer. Here she is…

The kit was a lot of fun to build - tried a few new interesting techniques, but none very difficult, and the outcomes are quite satisfactory. What more can a modeler asks for

By the way, a reminder that the GK Japan modeling contest deadline is fast approaching (8/31!), unless you’re an incredibly fast builder, stop procastinating!

Reflect Cammy part 7 (final)

Finally finished up the rest of the detailing for her. I made some last ditch effort to shorten her beret and see if I could have her hold it, but it just didn’t look as good if she didn’t. Ah well. At least I think I managed to put it together with the boots without making the trio look too crowded.

Boy she’s another kit that felt like it takes forever~~~~

For Cammy I made a few choices I don’t usually make, like having her eyes staring straight. Usually I find eyes staring sideways give the figure more intensity; but in this case, I’d like the figure to be viewable from both the front and the back, so I had to compromise by the middle stare.  Clickity click the pic below to visit her gallery.

Some stuff I didn’t mention during the WIP… Her hair pieces are cast in clear resin which is nice, but is rather hard to take advantage of. In fact I wish there weren’t in clear so that I didn’t have to pressure myself to make the braids transparent Anyway I learned lessons such as “don’t do a wash on clear parts with oil” and “don’t do a wash on clear parts with regularly thinned clear paint” I eventually washed them with very thin clear, otherwise the pieces will look a bit dirty. After a thin layer of base color with drybrushed interference gold, I think I managed to preserver a little bit of the translucency of the braids.

Although I didn’t use the blonde eyebrows I bought for her eyebrows, I found them extremely good as stray hair The single bang she had is a bit weird on a real type figure; it might have worked better in her Shadowloo uniform because of the cap? Anyway may be I should’ve installed a second stray bang that’s usually visible in her character pics, but I think the stray hair works ok in making the bang less weird. As to why I didn’t use blond eyebrows… they’re actually quite hard to spot, and may end up making her look eyebrowless

Ah! Kagura san!

 While waiting for the 20 coats of Future I put on Cammy’s base to cure, today I received all the needed supplies to create the pool-side base for this WF 2007 Kagura kit that I had painted last week. I like this Kagura sculpt a lot, and the stretching  pose is so neeeat.  I’m going to add a little water dripping on her later.

I had some struggles with whether to go with a rectangular base or a circular one. A rectangular one is much easier to make, but after comparing the options a circular one would better “contain” the figure… I can’t explain it too well. Anyway to create a raised pool side I stacked and truncated a couple of acrylic disc and laid some Evergreen tile styrene sheet on top. A disc at the bottom serve as the water edge; since I had too much excess resin from Cammy I put a layer on the acrylic disc to create some undulation on the water surface. The rails were actually the headache part; I thought I could bend a couple of aluminum tubes for it, but the tubes will fold most of the time instead of creating a curve. Perhaps I needed solid aluminum tubes, but at the diameter I needed it’s perhaps very difficult to bend without tools. Anyway I discovered a bag of styrene cylinders I bought a while back, and by superheating them I could slowly bend them into shape. Took a few tries, but in the end it works out ok. Still needed to patch up the back of the base later.

Reflect Cammy part 6

Just realized I missed part 5

After weighing various options I bought small bottles of EasyCast clear resin for the water. The resin is very runny and takes a while to cure; I could still stir the mixture around after 6-7 hours. But I’m quite impressed how bubble-free the resulting cast is (unless I stir it ) I have wanted to create some water motion for the running river, so I tried to create flow by shaping the uncured resin. But it levels extremely well so in the end I wasn’t half successful. This thing takes about 24 hrs for soft cure, and 3 days to fully cure, so after waiting a day I applied heavy gel on top to create some small flow. The gel is white on application, and it’ll dry clear. In the pics the gel has only partially dried, so you can still see some cloudy spots.

I did a pretty stupid thing when casting the resin. As you can see, the diorama base is raised, so I needed to put up some “walls” so that the resin can stay put. Well unlike other more reasonable modelers, I used Playdol clay to put the wall up, since it “feels” that this setup should be more leak-proof. Well it’s leak-proof alright, but it’s also insanely hard to scrap away the remnants of the clay, which sticks and smears to everything it touches. Lesson learned In the process I also did quite a bit of damage to the wooden base, so I had to refinish it. The back of the wood is beyond help, I probably will have to cover the whole base with another color; what a waste of time.

I’ve also created a couple of “horse shoes” which are used as the special circular “guards” on top of Cammy’s boots. I have not been able to find designs of the boots when they are untied, so I assumed they are rubber and will yank outwards when the boots are untied, turning the original circle shape into a horse shoe shape. The laces will be taken care of properly later.

Oh yeah, one thing that puzzles me is that the resin has to be stirred for a couple of minutes *twice*, each time in separate containers. Not sure what the point is.