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PROGRESS REPORT, WEEK 2:
It is done. :-)
But first of all, apologies for not posting on tuesday/ wednesday as promised. I wasn't able to do any but the most cursory work before friday due to the unfortunate interference of real life , in the form of university work (which took longer than expected, as it always does...) and social life.
I started working again on friday afternoon, and it took me until late sunday afternoon - why you might (rightly!) ask ? After all I posted that I was close to finishing last friday, with the arms being the only major parts left to do ...
Well, one might say there were some minor (hah...!) troubles:
-First of all, the left leg broke off and I had to repair it, and had to handle it more carefully afterward ("wounded in progress" pic included) .
-Later the same leg broke off again, this time at the ankle (no pic, since at that time I seriously was *not any longer* in the mood to take pictures...).
-The crucifix (on her loincloth): This thing seriously hates me! You might remeber that I lost the first crucifix I had done. Now this one, like the first mostly made of plastic, melted at the ends while I had the miniature under a lightbulb for faster curing .
Seriously, this is the first time that *ever *happened to me, it must have been just slightly closer to the lamp than usual...
Fortunately nothing happened to the tiny skull (made of Green Stuff), so I decided to snap the crucifix off to be able to reuse the middle part and save myself the trouble of sculpting such a fine piece of detail again.
Did that, placed the piece on the side, one hour later I turn to pick it up: it's gone, must have been my *breathing*, I don't know. I had lost it again (!)... and had to redo it from scratch - on the positive side, it looks better now in my opinion (though not better than the first one, unfortunately).
- The studs (on the shoulder pads, the robes and the gloves): I sculpted about half of them (which was quite some fiddly work, I can assure you !) before I decided that I couldn't really do them true to scale (unless I had spent about two days - straight - on at, at the end of which you could have extracted my brain with a drinking straw through my ears). The way they were, they made the mini look really cluttered, so I took them off again (disturbingly, they also came off far too easily)
-And finally, this is the bummer. What is just about the worst nightmare if you are doing a multipart mini?
Right, the parts might not fit. Well, they didn't - more precisely, I had modelled the sleeves on the main body too far back, so that the bolter and the hand supporting it didn't meet ! So I had to carefully (!) cut off the sleeves with the finest razorblade I had. That done, I slowly rebuild them ,sep by step, comparing them with both arms, to make sure they would fit this time.
And now I'm finished. I have taken quite anumber of pictures with my friends digicam. Unfortunately it is only 3.2 megapixels, and the zoom is pretty weak. In addition to that, I had no no prior experienece worth mentioning with a digicam (nor photography in general), and I didn't have a tripod, so the slight shaking of my hands (even with the elbows braced on the table) makes for slightly blurry pics. All in all, the pictures have better resolution than the scans, however, not to mention that I was more flexible with choosing the perspective.
To make up for the long wait, I also took some shots of some other pieces that I thought might be of interest to you. I will make a separate post for them, since I can attach only one file, and both images are big enough as is.
So,here are the sister pics for you. I hope you like the finished result.
The shots under #1 are full body shots of the assembled mini from all angles. Please note that the parts are only held in place by small globs of the sticky yellow partof Green Stuff, so it doesn't quite look like glued on, since this adds some space betweeen the parts thus joined. I also only noticed when seeing the photos, that the right hand (gripping the bolter) is attached too low to the sleeve, the proportions look rather starnge this way ;-) (they are not perfect anyway, but this makes it much worse than it actually is, trust me).
Pay attention to the two skulls which you haven't seen yet, one on the crucifix, the other on the rebreather (or whatever that thing is). I also did a frag grenade which is visible on the back shot. Finally, I resculpted the bolter magazine, as I announced, and I think it looks much closer to the original now.
#2 shows some shots of the main body alone. Even though the pics are a little blurry you might be able to make out the fleur de lys and the eagle on the right and left shoulders respectively, as well as the skulls and the grenade again.
#3 shows some images of the other parts;not much to comment here, except that you might now see, why I said I preferred the bolter from the left side.
#4 wounded in progress...very blurry, to get this past the censors, as it is quite gruesome to behold ;-)
Finally, self critique:
There are a few things I am not quite satisfied with in the finished miniature, and which I ought to keep in mind next time.
-Mainly:the bolter and the backpack are too thick compared to the body.
-Also, the left hand doesn't really grip around the bolter, which is closely related to the above problem.
- I should have added some detail to the belt (e.g. buckle, more stuff), but I feared it would look cluttered.
-The right arm (left from the viewer) is a little strangely positioned. Also, both arms look a little too long, IMO. I might yet cut off a little from the left arm, so that it goes farther into the sleeve, not yet sure.
Most of those problems are probably due to having worked on the individual pieces parallel, and not finished one of them (the body) first, so as to have one piece to compare to for the sake of proportion.
That's it. Not quite sure what to do next. However, whatever it will be, I have decided to set aside a few fixed hours each day for sculpting in the next few weeks, instead of spendind entire days just on sculpting at the cost of university work (or vice versa, for that matter).
Cheers,
Drasannar
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"...and they taught me terror. How to use it and how to face it."
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, back to the doghouse for me.
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, honoury membership is a must!
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