Fixing Four

I’ve been working on and off doing fixes to Four Murasame that I posted a few weeks ago. Apparently a combination of factors made some people think that the shape of her breasts weren’t right, in that they were cone-shaped and didn’t flow smoothly from the chest. After investingating a bit, I think the problem lies with the kit’s sculpt. It seems there are odd grooves above her breasts, and I think when I started working on her a long time ago I’ve spotted it and thought something was wrong, but has since then forgotten about it. So I did some filling…

The shading of the area, and my photography setup also contributed to this problem. So after fixing all these things, I think I can finally lay her to rest

To be honest I didn’t really like the lighting I had in my previous batch of photos; it didn’t have that special soft touch. It’s more like my older pics taken with sunlight, with the scene well-lit everywhere but lacking soft shadows. So I experimented a lot and found one that works well albeit not perfect. I think I really need a second flash at times like this, sigh.

Four Murasame on Bed

After messing around with lights I’ve finally taken the batch of pics for Four. I now see why photograher needs two sets of lights, one for backfill and one for “above”. I used to take pics lacking the backfill, instead used reflectors for those. Works for smaller kits, but once I get to bigger kits or “deeper” kits like Four, I couldn’t get light to where I wanted. In Four’s case, I had trouble getting light on her face. In this batch I switched the light source to the backfill position, and while the pics looks very well-lit and nice, it’s lacking that special touch somehow.

Here‘s the description of the kit, and here‘s the WIP – I’m going to use the blog posts as WIP pages from now on, very convenient.
I’ve also made a couple of wallpapers.

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Another version

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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.

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!

Experiments

I went to a local Jo Ann’s to buy some fabrics for my Ring-Ring Rang-Rang pair. I ended up spending 2 hours there to pick different fabrics for my kits! I remembered this Four Murasame on bed kit from a while ago – I never could decide what I wanted to do with the bed, but now I know. I found some post-modern patterned fabric for her. I decided to divide up the bed into the mattress and blanket part, and do the mattress with regular fabric and the blanket with the fancy one. The edge between the two is jagged and ugly, I’ll need to fix that later.

Do you guys remember the yellow tube of glue called UHU? I bought something similar from the Pacer brand (Zap Goo), but it’s so strong – I don’t remember those UHU glue sticking to your fingers and takes like 15 minutes to get off? Anyway that’s what I used to glue the fabric to the kit.