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.

Attack of the grail kit part 4

Warning: RANT

I have been having a bad week trying to figure out what I want to do with the frame… seriously, that’s perhaps the least important part of the kit and yet consumes the most thoughts!

There are these couple of issues. First, the frame can’t be too detailed, since the girls are already in a pretty complex setup. Fancy stuff will tend to clutter up the whole thing even more. Secondly it can’t be too bright or too dark, either will disturb the pretty harmonious theme. The original leaf-motifed decorative ridge on the frame creates the first problem, having all those decorations, while neat, is a big distraction. Not to mention that the frame is so steep, it seems to make a scene a bit claustrophobic. It seems if I do away with the decorative ridge, at least I have more options. So after some heavy dremeling, it’s gone! The resin dust traveled far, spreading over absolutely everything in my apartment, grrrr… after vacuum them off and then some tedious hacking and sanding, I’ve basically removed the frame; now I have to make one myself.

There are many options on what to do next. One thing I really want however is to extend the “pool bottom” background a little bit, because space was too tight before. I could extend it all the way to the edge, but then it’d make the girls look like they’re isolated in the middle of nowhere So I thought some sort of frame is still necessary. After some long discussions with Masa (THANKS!), it seems some metallic motif would fit pretty well given Silent Moebius is futuristic. But I thought a silver/aluminum frame would be too bright, so we still have problem 2. Stones motif was suggested as well (Thank you all as well!), but it seems like the solidity of rocks would contrast with the softer theme of the kit; the only way I thought rocks would work is to have some roman columns lining up on either side, supporting an arch above and some structure below. That’d be nice, but quite involved.

Anyway lacking ideas, I wandered into a local hardware store, and found some very interesting paints that I could use. There is this “Hammered Surface” line of paint that creates a texture that looks like the surface was pounded on, creating lots of uneven dull undulating relief. There are also many choices of colors as well, and I was taken to the “Light Blue”, which doesn’t look light blue at all, but a dull metallic greyish blue. So I bought it as well as a “Dark Bronze” can and gave it a shot. I created the new frame with pla-plates, and shot a few coats of hammered light blue on it, and here we go.

It’s not perfect, but it also doesn’t look out of place with the rest of the kit. I’m starting to wonder if I did myself a disservice by trying to be too fancy (I spent a lot of time looking at stained glass for instance… which by the way would perhaps create the most fantastic frame ever ) For now I’ve Bostick’ed the new frame onto the plaque, lest I come up with some better ideas later and want to redo the whole thing. Or may be I’ll drybrush some aluminum on the textured surface later. Or not. The paint has some weird semi-metallic reflective properties, so it’s not clear whether it’s metal or not. The outer frame has the hammered dark bronze on it, but you can barely tell it from gun metal. The texture is also much harder to spot on the dark surface.

I’ve also done a lot of touch up works on the girls which took approximately forever… every time I thought I’m done I found more flaws… and dude, even a week after proclaiming I’ve pulled all the liquid masks off, I’m still finding leftovers Then there are numerous fixes, like darkening Kiddy’s skintone (lower right), since I felt it was too close to Kasumi’s before (lower center). Now Kiddy is clearly different from Kasumi, and yet doesn’t stand out too much.

Now I’m moving on to detailing. To avoid smudging oils I’ll be going top down, so Rally gets some cosmetics and accents first. Anyway right after I’ve taken the pics, I think removing the ridge is a good trade off (not that I can undo it ) The girls are now better illuminated compared with the pics in the last post, as they’re no longer inside the tub created by the ridge. But I might have lost some of the “antique grace” of the original leaf motif.

Boy this is perhaps the longest blog post so far

Attack of the grail kit part 3

After a week of non-stop painting/masking, The plaque is finally taking up color! You’ve gotta see the leftover masking liquid film that I pulled off, it’s insane

There are many nook and crannies on the kit, the masking film sometimes get lodged in them and make the film hard to pull up. A little bit of Delta ceracoat helped ease that; I wish I actually apply it all over the kit before I try pulling up the masks, it’d have reduced the time required to lift them off.

Anyway, as you can see I’ve picked my background – an aquatic pool-bottom pattern. I think it blends in well with the rest of the kit and is soft enough.
But now the headache follows to the frame… originally I thought about gold-leaving it, but it’d have been quite harsh in contrast to the framed content.
Argh. Before I go there though, I still have many things to fix! I’ve forgotten to mask over some areas so I needed to do some touch ups first Like the
purple patch below Kiddy’s gun, is just one of several unmasked spots.

Attack of the grail kit part 2

While waiting for paint/putty to dry on Cammy, I’ve picked up the Silent Moebius Venus plaque again, this time working on it for real Originally I wanted to saw off the frame so that I won’t have such a hard time with painting the base, but my largest dremel saw disc couldn’t penetrate the resin, so I gave up the idea.

I’ve seen two buildups of this kit and they were all monochrome, casting the girls as statues, presumably due to the PAIN in masking. But this kit being one of my grail kits will have none of that! I collected the different skintone mixtures I’ve mixed over the past couple of years and used them on the girls. For instance, Kiddy’s (lower right) is Mina‘s skin tone It’s a bit difficult to diversify the tones while staying true to their character art, because all of them are usually rendered in the same pale whitish anime skintone. First some names:
Top: Rally
Second row: Lebia, Yuki
Thrid: Nami, Katsumi, Kiddy

Yuki and Nami being younger gets paler skintone, and while Yuki got my normal light mix, Nami gets a more reddish one (which was actually created by mistake for another kit ). Katsumi has Kacchu Musume‘s slightly darker/healthier skintone, and Rally being on the top and most obvious spot, gets my most recent Mizuki mix. Lebia though was quite hard. Being caucasian she should be rather pale, but I wanted some contrast with her and the two even paler characters adjacent to her. So I made a paler version of my recent Cammy mix for her. So far I’ve only shaded Rally and Kasumi (to avoid having to mask… that’s why you’d see some spill over on Nami and Kiddy ) By the way besides the painful masking, this kit is also exhausting to paint since it’s so darn heavy, being cast in solid resin

I’m planning a regal pearlescent purple for the flowing drape, but I’m still agonizing over what to do about the base. The only thing I know is that I need something of a light color, or else the whole thing will look too “heavy”. Wanted to do something cool with it, which is why I wanted to remove the base and put the girls on top of a piece of fancy fabric. But that option is out Btw you saw that huge gash on the lower right, as well as all those holes around the edge – those are my failed attempt at separating the frame

Reflect Cammy part 2

Finally action resumes on Codyland where we left off, with un-nazi-rized Cammy. I’ve made a lot of changes in the past week, but it’s a hassle to take my camera out of the photo rig setup these days.
Btw it’s a royal pain to upload multiple images with wordpress!

I made two main changes from last time, first I corrected the unsightly right shin that was bent wayyy too much, and second I’ve lowered her left shoulder. Because her shoulders were hidden under some heavy pads, it was a lot of guess work how she look underneath them. In the first version I guessed wrong on her left shoulder, making her look like she was shrugging

Another challenge is her feet, sculpting those toes were quite difficult. If they were anime characters’ toes, I think I’d have a lot more leeway, but with a masterfully sculpted figure like this there’s less chance for mistakes.

Comments? I’ve only got her base skintone on so there’s still room for fixes.

Un-nazi-rizing Cammy

I’ve spent most of the weekend resculpting Reflect’s Cammy. Here’re a couple of original buildups of her:

This famous sculpt is great, except I’m not a fan of her Nazi uniform, so I’m changing her to adorn her original Delta Red outfit. In addition, she’s done with a fight and relaxing a bit, so she’s taken off her boots (will be on the floor) and the red beret (will be held in her right hand). I was actually quite nervous when I was doing the resculpt, since I’m nowhere close to Yoshizawa’s sculpting skills. Her twisty right leg was tricky, with the boots it didn’t look too bent, but without it I had some trouble making it look right. Her shoulders were also quite hard for me since I had to completely resculpt them, because the original kit had them padded with armor. I’ve only done the right shoulder so far. Actually I haven’t really spent too much time on the left side of her body/arm. The 6-7 round of sanding, shaping and priming for her right side was torturous…

And while we’re at it, I’ve reshot the Yukishiro Cammy‘s pics. I wasn’t able to get a satisfactory set before, but with the second flash she came out a lot more defined.

Tattoooooo

I’ve been working on this Tsukasa Bullet Mizuki ninja girl. Originally I just wanted to make her armor detachable, but then I thought since she’ll have a completed bare back with her armor removed, it’ll be great to give her a full-back tattoo like the traditional Japanese warriors. I’ve been doing some research on tattoo decals, which are used by people to stick temprary tattoos on their skin for a couple of days. After Googling the web a bit I found and ordered some nice ones from tattooshock.com (I’m not sure I wanna recommend them tho, somehow they managed to get the order very wrong…). It’s hard to find something that’s like the real traditional Japanese tattoo, which totally covers the back of the person plus shoulders; nevertheless I think just having something that almost cover her back would be quite exciting. (click on image to enlarge)

This cobra and rose tattoo I picked for her is perhaps not very oriental… ah not caring anymore, cool is all that counts The application is nothing like regular water decal. These things have two backings – one side has glue and the other one is attached to a sheet of paper, which will come off when you soak in water. You’re supposed to stick the glue side on the surface, and wet the other side so that the other backing will come off. But man this is hard for Mizuki’s curvvy back! The backing is qiute thick and so it doesn’t really bend. Also the glue is quite strong so there’s not much chance you can adjust it. So I put her and the decal in a bowl of water and tried my best to fit the decal on. Well it worked mostly, but some parts did tear and I had to do quite a bit of touch ups. When I took the pics, I had gave her a few coats of future to protect the decal, that’s why her back is so glossy I’ll be misting a thin layer of skintone later to blend the tattoo in better with the figure.

On to the rest of Mizuki. After thinking about it a bit, it seems copper is the best match for her armor in the original illustration, and the result looks quite nice, although the original material is probably leather. I’m also wondering whether I should put the petal tattoo in the originally character design on her face. From the buildups I’ve seen, it appears that the petal tattoo has the property of making her face look stretched from some angles; I’m not quite sure why…

Figure time :)

I’m restarting on my real stocking Lilith after working on 3 mech kits straight I modified her lips to appear to blow a kiss to the viewer. Well not really, she’ll be blowing bubbles, and the scene will have lots of bubbles surrounding her in addition to the ones on the base.