forcing inspiration

Originally posted: March 23, 2012, 01:31
When inspiration isn't there, it's hard to force it or find a way to make things work. Sometimes I can jumpstart the inspiration by doing something that feels more like something that 'needs' to be done than like a creative endeavor.
Today I started out with fixing Shino's wig.

On the left we have Volks' Amakusa Shiro Tokisada, whose outfit and wig I acquired for Shinozaki. However, the whole curling in ends didn't do much for me so I took a flat iron to it. It mostly got rid of the curling but it did make the ends really frizzy. After ages of being lazy about this, I took boiling water to it to get rid of the frizz. (sidenote: the bangs never behaved like that for me. When I got the wig it wanted to part to the side the way I have it styled. But with more curling, something akin to the way everyone in my elementary school styled their bangs with a round brush)
After taking the wig off for styling, I noticed that Shino's eyebrows were rubbing off and decided to redo his faceup. All was going well until a sudden wave of extreme humidity swept in out of nowhere and caused my spray sealant to misbehave, messing up all my hard work. By this point I wasn't feeling up to starting over so I did what I could to make it tolerable until I feel like trying over again.

Probably the only clear shot I've gotten of Shinozaki in... ever. I'm really fond of him but he just doesn't always cooperate for photoshoots. A lot of that was his rather poorly designed neck hole. He was unable to move his head up and down but I fixed that today and now he has a lovely range of motion in his head and I feel like it just brings him to life.
Shino is probably one of the best 'happy accidents' to happen to me since getting into BJDs. With pretty much every other mold, I hand-picked it for a character or just loved it to death and had to find a way to make it work. But Soom's Chrom never appealed to me. Some owner pics made him look really good, but not the kind of good where I'd think "I want one." But then I was looking for a new head for Lyric and was getting desperate and saw a particularly sad looking Chrom and thought "you know. This could work."
Of course, in person it was all wrong for Lyric. He looked far too Asian and, while he can pull off sad, it's not the Lyric kind of sad. He ended up in the floating head cabinet for months. And then one day I decided it was time to clean him up and take sale pictures and as I was getting him out of the cabinet and heading to the bathroom in search of alcohol to wipe his face off with, I realized what I wanted to do with him.
Reminiscing tangents aside, I did do one other mini-project today. That was to make Esyrlon and Theorin rings:

They're the same style, but Esyrlon's is silver and Theorin's is gold. (Theorin really needs more character-appropriate clothing so he doesn't look so out of place next to Esyrlon). I got the idea because I was trying to think of a new way to do Eyrlon's stole/scarf deal because the gold chain deal wasn't really meshing with his ensemble. I decided I wanted to stick with more silvers and was considering other sorts of adornments people have worn throughout history when it occurred to me that I tend to neglect rings, despite the fact that those are some of the most common jewelry that people wear.
So I decided Esyrlon needed at least one. And then I got the idea to give Theorin a matching one. Kind of like wedding bands or something. (Which would make sense seeing as they are married. Or the Elvish equivalent of married.) If I had some sort of fancy metal cutting stuff I'd probably have made them thinner. They're made from discounted earrings.
Made a couple extras for fun. (tried to do matching ones for Elaria and Malesar too but Elaria's fingers are SO tiny.. it didn't work out). Off to sleep now. Goodnight!