Okay, I am definitely the worst at posting updates.  Hell, I'm terrible at just taking in progress shots.  But, I AM trying.  I'm just not trying too hard.  :)


Anyway . . . post!




Alright, I have been working on stuff.  Finishing up and readying armor pieces painting, working on figuring out some clothing stuff, continually having to rethink that clothing stuff as the hormones continue to grow my boobs (yay!).  All of these things I have failed, to some extent, in taking pictures.  I did take some, but for those I didn't I will try to walk through.

     Amethyst

Amethyst only really has a few pieces of armor that need to be constructed.  Her crown and her bracers.  The crown took a bit of fiddling to while experimenting with the different crown designs she has worn throughout the series.  I finally opted for a kind of amalgamation of them all.  Regal but not too ornate.  It is a smaller size to fit Lindsey's head and her preference.  This was made from the standard craft foam and worbla sandwich.  I used the thin foam for this.  I ornamented the crown with for ovoid/teardrop gems made from Instamorph.  This stuff attaches really well to worbla, so I just needed to heat the bottom of the gem and the place I want to set it and connect them.  Thing is pretty much one solid piece.  I surrounded the base of the gems with some thin tubes made from scrap worbla.  I worked the edges of the tubes down into the crown to look like mounting for the gem.  This also hides any inconsistencies with the join of the gem to the crown.  The end looks pretty great.  though I failed to take pictures . . . real surprise there, eh?

Her bracers seemed difficult but turned out pretty easy, actually.  After doing some trial and error on Lindsey's arm to find the best fit for the design as well as her own comfort level I ended up with a pretty close shape to Amethyst's bracers.  The design for the bracers are pretty consistent throughout the series and even re-imaginings that I really didn't need to decide on a specific design.  The general design is a basic bracer with filigree along the edge and on the inside.  So, after shaping the bracer itself, I began using wobla sausages made from scraps to design the half-moon and squiggles found on the bracers.  The result isn't as ornate as the comic book version, but it will look pretty good once painted, I think.

     Wilhelmina

Okay, I finished the rest of the armor bits for her that you haven't seen.  After previously deciding to not build the shin pieces up from the boot itself, or even connect them for that matter, I created shin pieces that strap about mid shin.  To make it look like these actually connect to the boots, I have modified the bottom of my leggings to have a shiny wet-look black fabric.  When combined, this look like the shin pieces truly are connected to the boots.  The effect is pretty cool, actually.  Of course . . . no pictures of this.

The harness buckle and the belt buckle/armor piece were easy to make.  Just a matter of layering foam and worbla in the correct order to get the right shape.  Not much to say there.  Drilled some holes in the sides of the belt buckle where they are in the original design.  That's about it.



Similarly, the one thigh and arm plates were very simple.  Same basic design for both, too.  I did the standard foam and worbla sandwich and secured the pieces together to make the result.

Yeah . . . not much in the way of pictures.


With all of that done, it is time for smoothing.  I looked at options from basic sanding on up to expensive smoothing agents.  I tried sanding, wood glue, gesso, and abs goop.  I decided to go with abs goop.  It went on smooth (for the most part, I'll talk about that in a bit), dried quickly, and was generally really easy to work with.  The acetone in the concoction works well in slightly melting the plastic in the worbla and fusing it with the layer of abs goop laid down.  It only takes about five minutes or so for each layer to dry, so you can almost immediately move on to the next layer.  I completely smoothed a piece of armor in about a half hour instead of the many hours it would have taken with the other options.  There were some snags, some of which you would have with other methods.  The first seems common when smoothing with various liquid agents and that's build up on curves and details.  This build up actually worked to my advantage with the filigree on the bracers and made it looked more full and one with the body of the bracer.  It didn't work to my advantage on other things where I wanted a very sharp delineation between on part and another.  The second big issue I found was keeping a good consistency in the abs goop itself.  As you work through the goop, it becomes thicker and thicker as the acetone both evaporates and the heavier goopy bits drop to the bottom of the container.  This meant that some layers were not as even as they should have been and actually ended up with streaky build-up in places that I needed to go over again.

In the end, I really liked the results of using the abs goop for smoothing and I will definitely be using it in the future.  I will probably make a thinner version with a higher acetone to abs ratio.  This will mean more layers, but I think the thin nature will mitigate some of the issues I found.

I have now primed the pieces and will begin painting them soon.  Happy days!  Progress has been made!

It's Prime Time!