progression of modification: Deidara

For those who haven't followed me since I used to post these updates on doll projects on LJ, a looong time ago back when I was first getting into bjds, I was really heavy into Naruto and my favorite characters were Sasori and Deidara (I still wear a ring on my left thumb because that's the finger Sasori wore his on).

Anyway, I decided I needed them in doll form. This was something I had to have, and it felt like this oh-so-appropriate combination of their two methods of creating art, what with things being hand sculpted with clay initially and then cast as crazy puppet-esque dealies. (minus the explosions but.. sorry Dei, I'm in Sasori's camp there)

Rambling. Sorry. So I got molds for them and I did all these heavy mods to Sasori's body to make it look right for him and it's still one of the mod projects I'm the most proud of. But as the years have gone by and the direction of my collection has changed, I've been less inclined to do anything with them because their style just no longer appealed to me as much as it once did.

I mentioned last time (I think) that in an effort to reconnect with Dei, I attempted some mods on him that didn't turn out so well. And recently I was inspired to try to fix him up.

We'll start with a couple before pics to show what I was working with. He is a DiL Rydel and I'm fairly certain they were an offshoot of DiM that doesn't exist anymore.

The first is an old picture I took. The face up was still mostly default but I added eyeliner. This was back before we'd actually seen Deidara's left eye, so I was kind of making up stuff and decided to go with some crazy target eyes from Soom for that one. The second picture is from someone's sales thread since I don't have many good pictures.

The first order of business was to reduce the size of the eyes to something more reasonable. I was having trouble getting the other eye to match up properly so I decided to just sculpt his scope right onto his face and be done with it.

I had originally planned to mod the mouth back into a more neutral expression but then I got it in my head that maybe the grin could work after all so I added more epoxy and went in that direction.

 After sanding things (relatively) smooth I decided to coat everything with my airbrush and test out a face up to see how things were coming along. Of course, I found all sorts of little scratches and uneven spots after airbrushing was done. Mostly around the mouth and corners of the scope. The eye was pretty smooth.

I put on Dei's old wig just so the head would be less naked for pictures. From certain angles I like the mouth and from others I don't. Not sure yet what I'll do about that but I'll sleep on it. I didn't bother to paint the scope since this is a trial run anyway and that would have taken a lot more time and energy.  It feels slightly off from the other eye, probably because I sculpted it with his original eye size in mind and didn't take into account where his eye actually would be if it had been modded as well. Silly me. Not sure it bothers me enough to fix and it'll be covered with hair most of the time anyway.