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.

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…

Attack of the grail kit part 5

OMG over the last week I’ve been detailing one girl per day non-stop, it was exhausting…
Right now I have 5 out of the 6 girls’ faces detailed, except Kasumi (lower middle). Still a bit more to go! I still haven’t converged on a good frame idea, arrrggggh

Reflect Cammy part 3

Did more corrective work on the Reflect Cammy, and now it’s painting time. She’ll be holding her Beret Cap on her right hand, and her unloaded boots will be lying somewhere on the floor.