PoM: Deidara, part 2 + arms for Moment

I put my hand over part of Dei's mouth last night and decided the problem was that his smile was too wide on the right side, so I set to work rearranging that some and then set the head aside for the epoxy to cure.

In the mean time, an exciting package arrived !

I've been wanting to do something with my Dollzone Moment for ages now, but he really couldn't do much aside from just stand in place because of how heavy and unwieldy his petal arms were. I put up a wtb thread looking for regular arms for him, hoping to get something that would let me replace the lower half of his arms so that he would have a wider range of positions open to him.

I found someone willing to sell pretty quickly and today the arms arrived.

After a bit of work and some hot glue sueding, he can now stand un-aided and sit down without arm parts sticking out for a mile. I'm not sure yet if I'll hold onto the petal parts I'm not using just on the off chance I want to put them on from time to time or if this new arrangement will be his new permanent state. I'm leaning toward the latter because in his current state he strikes a good balance between fancy parts and functionality (in my opinion).

I'm really not used to dealing with dolls in the 40cm range so when I first opened the arms I was convinced they were far too small for him. They work well though. The color is slightly off but it doesn't bother me. And now I feel like I can design some sort of outfit for him and figure out what I want to do about a face up and other fancy leaf/petal stuff.

I also took a few photos of other dolls who only had temporary pictures up on the page listing all of them. And then I got back to work on Deidara. I re-did his face up and actually painted his scope dealy this time.

Then I spent hours making him a wig even though I realized about five minutes into it that it probably wouldn't work as well as I wanted. It might have worked out okay if I hadn't messed up on the style. I kind of went into auto pilot and started doing it the way I'd done his first wig back when I had no idea what I was doing and didn't realize what I was doing wrong until the very end. Oh well. Learning experience. Next time I want to use different yarn too. I much preferred working with the stuff I used for Auralion's wig and it was a lot faster too.

New mouth pics with (mostly) painted scope. It still needs some small details added but it's functional for now.

There's a picture with the wig I spent far too long working on. It's not awful but it just didn't work out the way I wanted. I might not necessarily go 100% with his canon hair style since his ears are too far back for it to look right I think. We will see how it goes I guess.

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.