more mods and some face ups

I modded Orkas' head more after my post last night. I was looking at Elfdoll Vivien (a strong contender to take over the role if this head doesn't get its act together and work for me) and decided I would attempt to instill some of that sort of expression into the head I currently own because if it works out it will save me time and money.

Anyway....

Oh god that second one is orangey. Should have color corrected that but I so seldom feel the need to with the new camera that I didn't think about it. Oh well. Anyway... I still feel like he comes across a bit smirky or something when the camera is looking down on him. Also not sure I accomplished frowny squinty so much as just "the sun is in my eyes" squinty. But ... I chalk that up to my novice level of sculpting skills. I feel like it looks a bit better in person. He looks a bit young for his character now (I'm not sure why having smaller eyes makes him appear younger to me but... I have no idea how my brain works when it comes to 'shelling' characters.)

Here is a s hot of Iyrilaeth. His new face is very minimalist so far because I was quite frustrated after dealing with Orkas. I'm relatively pleased with his new, more neutral expression. I feel like ideally I should have built up the epoxy a bit more so there wasn't still an indent where his old mouth corners used to be. I'm too lazy to fix that right now though and it's functional on a basic level. This shot makes his nose look huge.

mouth mods

ended up deciding I did want to redo Orkas' face up. But then I decided one side of his mouth looked potentially more smiley than the other. During a discussion with Selly about why I needed to fix this, I realized that, whether or not I liked the Cyril sculpt as is, I needed to mod it if I wanted it to properly fit Iyrilaeth's character.

So after spending 90 years trying to tint epoxy and still failing spectacularly, I altered both of their mouths in an attempt to make them less smiley.

I decided to do Iyrilaeth's at the last second so his face up is only partly wiped because I was hurrying to make sure the epoxy wouldn't get too hard to be easily worked. I don't like how large Orkas' eyes are by comparison. Tempted to close them a bit or something. We'll see.

sweater attempts

I got pretty sick last weekend which kinda put Aura's outfit on hold. And, as so often happens, once I lose momentum it's hard to get it back. So today when I got inspired to try to work on some sort of project it was between redoing Orkas' face and making fitting clothes for Aleksandr.

Alek ended up winning in the end when I ran across a tutorial for making sweaters on DoA.

This is not the best sweater ever made and if I had it to do again I'd probably go with something with a tighter knit, but I really wanted this color and only had two pairs of socks lying around in this color. One would have resulted in a folded over turtleneck top part (which I liked) but would have made it impossible to avoid some sort of brand name or logo (which I didn't like).

I'd say it's not the greatest sweater I've ever made, but it actually is because I suck at sweaters. I think it will look passable once I make some sort of jacket for him to wear over it.

outfit progress (now with 'gloves')

Today I painstakingly crafted the glove dealies for this outfit. They're pretty simple, but it was a pain to get them right. The first attempt was fine with just the crushed panne velvet, but the brocade ruined the stretch so it didn't work anymore. If I had been thinking clearly, I would not have done this all in one piece and would have used snaps or velcro to fasten it in the back or something.

Anyway, after multiple attempts, I got these to work. I ended up having to hand sew most of them because I'm not good enough with the sewing machine to be accurate on such a small scale.

I'm relatively pleased with the results, however. Eventually I plan to remake the base robe in red silk and then add a semi-tabard dealy down the front and back so that the lower half of the robe doesn't look stupid boring by comparison.

It absolutely did not occur to me to even look at my sketch plans until after I posted this picture. I added the little parts around the wrist as an afterthought when I felt the gloves looked too plain. I was wondering why I didn't account for that. Then I realized that I DID. I just forgot. 

in progress clothing

after I got home from work today I got busy making outfits for Aura. I completely screwed up on the hood/cowl deal. I don't even know how it ended up the way it did but it comes to a point in the front and it was supposed to just be straight across. I don't know what I was thinking. So it looked weird and I added another layer under it and I liked it better. I still need to do the semi-tabard dealy and the gloves but I think I actually like this version of the top part better than my sketch or the modified version in my head.

I could not shoot this from an angle that didn't make it look stupid, so here's the best I managed.

attempting to design clothes

As much as I kind of like the look of the temporary outfit I have Aura in, I want him to have something of his own that isn't made of spare clothes and Batu's belt.

So I kind of sketched out something based on Priest tier 9. It's simplified because I couldn't make that outfit without wanting to chuck my sewing machine out the window after about five seconds of effort. Among other things.

So I sketched this thing out. I can't decide between the more WoW!Priest colors of greys and whites and black or something. And then the more blood elfy colors of red and gold. Aura's first RP outfit was red and gold but his actual priest tier 9 is more greys and whites.

The red and gold is probably more Aura cuz he's a flashy arrogant jerk. (But I love him that way). And he'd look too much like a unicorn in neutral colors. His hair is already lighter than I'd hoped (but it's growing on me) so I think the red and gold would liven him up some.

It's really hard to resist the urge to picspam him constantly. I'm so utterly and completely in love with his sculpt.

spam (because my new camera functions)

Just a quick update because I'm excited to have a functioning camera. It focuses so fast. I misremembered when I said I'd had my old one for six years. It would have been seven next year. It was old. And cost about 5 times as much as the camera I just bought today but such is the nature of technology.

I kept its old cord and put it on the new one to keep a part of it with me.

I have never had a camera that didn't require me to stop breathing to get a clear shot XD I'm very excited. (I don't need anything fancy. Just something that takes pictures. So this is a massively awesome feature for me.)

Here are two really quick shots taken next to my computer. I was super worried when the camera snapped the shots so fast because on my old one that almost guaranteed the shot was blurry. But then they weren't. It was so cool. XD

broken camera

My poor camera has combusted after six years of loyal service. I managed to get it working for a little bit this morning (long enough to take a zillion pictures of Auralion) and then once I turned it off it wouldn't work again.

So have some picspam and then I'm probably going to head off to start pricing cameras. Mine will be sorely missed.

 My camera didn't want to focus so out of over 120 pictures, these were some of the only ones that weren't blurry beyond recognition. Poor thing was so close to dying, but it was kind enough to allow me one last photoshoot.

Aura's hair is more of a platinum blonde irl but in photos it comes out very white.

I'm happier with this attempt at his face up. Hopefully once he has properly sized eyes he'll look better too! Right now he has 12mm eyes in and they're far too big. But I have some green glass ones in 10mm that should be coming soon. Found some cheap on the MP so that was exciting! Now I just need to make him some proper clothes instead of letting him borrow Batu's waist tie dealy combined with an inside out kimono. XD

Sadly there are 900 people in line ahead of him for clothing. But that doesn't always mean they get priority. So we'll see.

an unsuccessful evening of attempting to airbrush

I managed to color match the ears but I messed up on the face multiple times. Normal sealant and airbrush sealant were both giving me issues so the face up itself came out splotchy. I re-did it twice but finally gave up and just sealed it and put the head on a body because it's late and I didn't have time to redo it again and didn't want to leave him blank overnight.

Also his wig turned out much paler after the boiling. I'm used to wigs getting a little more dull after this treatment, but I was a little surprised at how light it was. Oh well. It's only a temp. It's way too wonky looking to be permanent.

Despite being out of focus, this shot was the only one I liked. Possibly because it's hard to see all the things that went wrong with the face up. And partly because I like the way the hair drapes in this one. Tomorrow after work I may give the face up another go. We'll see how it goes and if I feel up to dealing with the frustration.

When I do the official version of Aura's wig, I think I'll do it the way I draw it, with the part being off-center. One can't really tell where the part is in this picture, but it's in the center and I don't really like how it looks from the front.

more exciting arrivals (and some minor body and wig mods)

After I got my Cyril, I ended up selling a body I no longer needed in order to get him one of his very own. I did want to get him a Dollshe body and was just going to save up for that, but then a super duper cheap Angelsdoll 70cm body was up on the MP and I couldn't pass it up. It was the v1 body, not the v2. If it had been the second version I probably would have passed on it because I had some issues with my v2 prior to doing rather extensive mod work on it.

Anyway, RIGHT after I bought that someone decided to put up a Nabarro Har head on the MP. This was my dream head. I had up a WTB thread and was checking the MP for it every day. Seeing as I had just recently spent money, I was initially going to just pass on this, but the more I thought about it, the more I knew I would most likely regret it for a decent portion of forever if I didn't get this head.

Back story is done. Skipping forward a week and a half or so: the head and body both arrived today after I ran down to the mail box every thirty minutes or so. Sometimes every five minutes. I was a little over eager.

The packages sitting on the dining room table. I was going to just tear them open but I thought this was worth commemorating.

I opened the Har head first. Here you can see the boxception going on.

The mini-box was really quite cute.

My first glimpse of Har's head.

And he's free! His previous owner modded his mouth and gave him elf ears. I shall have to break out the airbrush to do some color matching.

For color comparison purposes, here is the body next to the head. Har's head doesn't match anything I own but that's not really a huge deal for me. I've never been hyper-concerned with resin matching. This does, however, show off the one drawback of this body (in my opinion). I've never been super keen on how inflated the chest looks. So it was off to the modding table outside to fix that...

I marked off the area where I wanted to dremel down the chest. Couldn't really mark the top part where I wanted to deflate it a bit but I mentally marked that.

After some dremel work, this is what I had. Well this is after dremel and a bit of sanding. It was pretty ugly at this stage. I was starting to thoroughly regret my entire life.

And then I spent more time sanding and started regretting life a little less as it smoothed out. It's still uneven but I was starting to lose the light so I figured it was good enough for the time being and called it quits. The pecs are still kind of a bit much compared to what I wanted for Iyrilaeth, but I may just leave them for the moment because I'm not 100% sure this will be his forever body. I also chose not to sand off the junk for that same reason (Iyrilaeth is androgynous). In the event that I do decide I am perfectly pleased with him on this body and do not want something else instead, mod work will continue.

After giving the body a quick shower to rinse off any leftover resin dust, I decided to get to work on giving Aura a temp wig.

This was a regular, center parted blonde wig. Using the ever-helpful boiling water, I re-styled it to allow it to be tied up in the back. It's not perfect but it will do for now.