Almost Four!

I can’t believe I left the CF card at work, so I can’t take pics of Four after just finishing her now She’s one of those kits that I say “I’ll finish her today” for a couple of weeks now

Thanks to Masa’s suggestion I removed the green sheet that has pretty bad color collision with the purple-themed components in the scene. It’s been replaced with a blue sheet, which indeed blends in better.

I’ve also thought very hard about her stockings. Although it’s a pretty neat idea, there are some difficult issues I don’t have ways to deal yet. For instance the fabric tends to trap dirt, which is pretty hard to remove; the seams could also flay a bit, and threads would come out. Adding to the fact that it doesn’t look as good on Four’s smaller scale (1/7) than on Lilith’s larger (1/5.5-ish) scale, the benefits seem to not worth the trouble, so I decided to strip them off and paint them instead. It was hard since I spent so much time getting them on in the first place, but sometimes you’ve gotta cut your losses…

Anyway here’s a snap shot a few days ago, when I was testing the blue fabric, and when I was just done with the stockings.

Blood+

I’ve finished the 2nd arc of Blood+, and I must say I’m liking the show a lot. The basic plot is pretty standard - evil corp turning people into monsters, girl kick-ass fighter, forgot who she is, lived peacefully with family until it got destroyed, trying to find herself. But the details somehow pull the show away from the deux es machina and complete predictability. Part of its focus is also unusual for anime of this genre, that family is very important, and the powerless family members somehow are still in the show contributing to events, and not just acting as plot devices (i.e. sacrificial victims and reasons for revenge). Looks like it’s picking up steam as well, with the 2nd OP and ED done by Laruku and Nakashima Mika respectively. Would be really interesting to see how this show turns out.

Weekend crunch #2

Continue from the last post…

The kit has an elongated layout, so I had to get a frame that has similar sort of aspect ratio. Again Walmart answered my call

I debated a bit on whether I wanted to save the trouble of cutting an acrylic sheet to replace the frame’s glass, but I did it eventually. Cutting acrylic without proper equipment is pretty nasty, but I still think it beats trying to drill holes into glass…

Drilled a few holes to secure the bed frame, and masked them before spraying glue to attach the petals. Originally I area-sprayed the acrylic surface to attach the petals, but in the end it made more sense to just spray in regions since the glue dried a bit faster than I expected.

After getting the sheet mostly covered, I attached the bed frame and fitted the acrylic sheet into the picture frame. I’m not quite down with the base yet but will have to wait until I’ve gotten Four/bed assembly onto the bed frame.

So back to working on Four. I had a bit of fun making the stray hair on her, and she looks cooler with those

Then I worked on getting the prom dress fabric onto the bed resin piece. I decided to not go with the reflective side of the fabric since it looks a bit cheesy. The dyed patterns on the fabric, I think, already looks good enough.Unlike last time, I sprayed glue on the sheet and then attached it to the frame - works much better than the other way around.

Alright, now the final form of the kit is visible, and it’s time to work on the details. In particular, I wanted her arms to rest on the bed properly. It was actually easy to achieve if I just stuff cotton underneath the fabric, rather than trying to fix Four to conform to the bed surface.

Weekend crunch

I rarely take a whole weekend to work on a kit, but I kinda got obsessed with finishing Four this time. Except for the few hours that I spent watching Blood+ — these dang end-with-cliffhanger shows are so evil

Her bed frame is made with craft wood, I banged it together and applied wood stains on it. This stuff stinks a lot though - I don’t remember it having such a strong odor last time I worked with it.

The hardest task this weekend however was to fit fabric stockings on her. Not much problem on her left leg, but her right leg, which bends a lot, was vile.

But why do fabric stockings in the first place? I thought this kit would be one that looks great with them, especially when her legs are posed in such a way that you can hide the fabric seams very effectively, namely the back of the legs where it’s almost totally invisible. Anyway back to the crazy bended right leg… I tried about 6 different ways to fit the fabric, and eventually concluded that I can’t really get a flawless piece that wraps around the whole leg, so I did a little trimming and let the less visible side of the leg run a small seam.

After fitting both stockings, I placed a length of lace on top of each stockings. Here in the pic I’ve already wrapped the assembly in parafilm for detailing of her upper body.

I wanted the bed to be submerged in a bed of vegtation… flowers are nice but may be there are some less eye-catching alternatives - I thought having very brightly colored flowers will steal a bit away from viewer’s focus on Four. Anyway I spent a couple of hours in flowers departments at Jo-ann’s, and found some foliage petals that looks nice and would fit the general motif of the kit.

So I’m going to work on getting the base set up.

Back to Four

While waiting for some mail order supplies for the Griffith on Horse kit, I got back to my fabrics experiments. Last week I went to Jo-ann’s and got some pretty nice “Prom dress” fabric that has great patterns and texture.

The problem is that it has these gold rings glued on the dang thing which doesn’t look good with scaled kits, so I neede to remove them. What else to try except the good’ol turpentine! But I really hate the strong odor of turpentine - you work with cup full of the thing and you better evacuate the house for several hours. But as I was Google searching for Turpenoid, a turpentine substitute, I found an amazing fact Turns out that Odorless mineral spirit that I’ve been using to thin oil paints *is* turpenoid. Yay! So I tossed a piece into a small pool of OMS and the rings just come off, yatta!

I don’t want to use up a pool of OMS however, so I brushed OMS onto the piece of fabric I’m going to use on Four’s bed:

let it soak the fabric a bit and yank off the rings using a sponge. After the OMS treatment the fabric appears to be doing fine except may be a bit less soft than before.

Anyway I’m not sure if anyone remember I was working on this kit a while back. At that time I used a nicely dyed semi-transparent fabric for the bed sheet, but it comes with these wrinkles that I think looked really unsightly. So I yanked it off and am going to go with this new piece. The yanking actually took several hours because I stupidly used the Zap Goo to attach the fabric.

For those of you looking for your Berserk kit fix though, I’d recommend Joa’s l33t
Zodd build up!

Still learning…

Have been working on re-photogaphing older kits for the new gallery. In the process I found that the white balance can’t be set to “Auto” on my Canon, which seem to arbitrarily change the temperature of the colors Like Shiki , which is one of the hardest kit to take pic of, even though I have better lighting this round I still would need to retake her shots once more to correct this white balancing problem. Yikes.

I’ve been happy with the ones with the correct WB though, such as the last kits here, so it takes away some of the frustrations

Griffith on Horse #2

Mucho sanding and priming later, the horse is sort of ready for painting. But I wanted to do more test fitting with its cape first.

The instructions said put the cape pieces in hot water and bend to shape. I think they’re just too thick for that, so I’m thinking of dremeling the edge so that it conforms to the contour of the horse as much as possible, and thin the rest so that I can at least bend those unconforming areas.

Working on Griffith as well. There were some nasty seam lines running along the very detailed scales on his armor.

This is when I started to look into the bits for answers. The diamond coated cone was my solution. The other various shaped stones were also very helpful in helping me level off the cape pieces, which have pretty rough casting with loads of flash.

Right now I have a bit of an issue with the leather I’m going to use with the kit. All the straps used on the horse are to be made with leather or imitations. The kit comes with a piece, but I found it too thick! Probably have to go to Jo-Ann’s this weekend to find some alternatives. I bought some leather online a while back from a shop called Rio Rondel which specializes in miniature horse stuff, but the scrap leather I bought from them were also too thick.

Arggggh

Don’t you hate it when you’re ready to ship a kit, just when you’re trying to wrap it up, when you thought oh, I needed to fix this one thing… and then dropped the whole kit on the floor Even though I’m perennially fixing broken things and have gotten pretty good at it, you still can’t help feeling frustrated over the big waste of time.
On the side note the gallery test seemed to have gone ok, so I’ll leave it up for a while and see what happens. Thanks for all the comments!

New gallery test

There are still more work to be done on my new Gallery2-driven gallery, but I think I should test things out first… say if the host still can’t handle the load, I should really switch before the 30-day trial period. So I’m giving it a one-day test drive I don’t have time to put everybody in yet, plus I want to reshoot some kits that I think are worth the trouble. But there are already quite a few new reshot kits (like 3/4 of the Oni Coach girls).
It’s really funny that I work at a place where our resources are constrained the least by computer cpu cycles. So I naturally didn’t think it’d be the problem with my hosting service. But now I read that many of these companies use Pentium 2 servers, which explains a lot…

Now with sauce

Wordpress has this Gravatar (globally recognized avatars) support, and I really like this feature so much that I’ve tossed it in. Then I realized I haven’t enabled registration on the site Yikes, got that fixed finally…

Thanks to Masa’s suggestion I’m converting the gallery to a more accessible format, with some tradeoffs. But it should be easier to navigate and easier for me to put new data in. It was really not an easy decision - you have two softwares - a mini content management/blog software, and a gallery. Each have their own hierarchy of data (pages and subpages for blog, albums and subalbums for gallery), so how do you combine the two, and which software would be the one driving the navigation? In the end it seems to make more sense to work inside a gallery — you want to navigate from pictures to pictures, with a little bit of textual information tossed in, rather than navigating to and from text/pictures all the time like the way I have it right now, which is not as good an experience. I didn’t really thought about this in the past.

Anyway back to working on the horse…