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.

Reflect Cammy part 5

Having more or less done with the main figure, I’m making a small diorama base for Cammy-chan. The scene depicts Cammy have just done her daily ass-kicking and is relaxing a bit along a river side, dipping her feet in very shallow water. The base is the usual Celluclay fair, but this time in order to create small “rocky beach” type of groundwork typical of river basins, I tried the Golden coarse pumice gel. I kind of like it, it’s really easy to apply and the grains sticks pretty well. I imagine finer pumice would be ideal for beaches. I’d like to add some pebble stones to give it a little variety. I don’t know what I want to do for water yet. Heavy clear gel would work, but may be a pain to apply for such a big area. May be I’ll try a little EZ water…

And yes, Cammy’s shoulder needs a little patch up later Her holding the beret cap in my previous post was a bad idea since it somehow made her left side look unbalanced. She looks more relaxed without it. I’ll just lay it on the ground or something.

Reflect Cammy part 4

Argh I think I’ve burned myself out last week doing marathon work on the Silent Mobius plaque. But after getting all the supplies I needed for Cammy this week I’m giving Cammy some due attention

I was waiting for her eyelashes to come; after seeing how they look on Reflect’s Rei, I think Cammy would look good with them as well, so I’ve bought a bunch of doll eyelashes to try. I still don’t have a good way to affix them to the kit however, and it was a battle to superglue them to Cammy’s eye-socket, involving lots of smudging and scraping. Argggh.

One thing I didn’t pay attention earlier was her braids. It turns out that in the original kit, the left braid was rested a little on her shoulder armor. In my version though, the shoulder armor is gone, and leaves behind a weird “bump” behind. I was trying to heat and twist the braids so as to remove the bump, but viola, it turns into this flowing pose that I much prefer! Combined with little bending on her “bang”, she now looks more like the “old” Cammy. I’ve also made a beret cap for her (yet to be detailed) to hold and am in the process of modifying the couple of boots into hers.

Now I just have to come up with a simple but effective base for her

Attack of the grail kit part 6

I’ve finally gotten the stained glass I was talking about as candidates for the frame. The good news is that they are indeed as fantastic as they were shown from the place where I bought it, coe90.com. The bad news is that like other iridescent materials they are really picky about lighting.

These two are both blue iridescent, with different base color.

This one is really neat, it has glass beads on top. But it looks like it’ll be difficult to get the iridescent rainbow colors to show at all. But even if that were the case, the beads resemble bubbles which would fit really well with the aqua motif. The main question is whether I can cut this thing at all…

This is what happens when the angle is not right, it’s all black

I also managed to cut myself in the first 5 minutes of handling these glass pieces, dang…

Next: Protect Gear?

While I was working on the recent Silent Mobius and Cammy kits, I was also looking into beefing up my Takara Protect Gear/Jin-roh figure; probably the next project after completing the duo. The make of the figure approaches the quality of garage kits, that’s why I’m loving it If I get the armor to be less monotonous, do away the seams and detail it properly, this Chuichi Koshiramaru figure should turn into sometime neat. At this point I’ve replaced the plastic machine gun ammo belt with one made with metal. The belt was stupidly expensive, but nothing else can give the kind of weighty suspension it does. I also need 2 of them, since the usual 50 round belt is too short for him. The plastic one has 100 and I guess I need another 25 or so.