Attack of the grail kit part 8 (final)

Cranking it!

After being in suspended animation for almost a year, I’ve finally done the touch up required to finish up this grail kit of mine, Silent Moebius Venus Plaque. Enjoy (nudity alert)

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.

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

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