Search found 4 matches for 11

davidd wrote:Wow! You've really upped your diorama game!

Nice foliage, excellent posing, the girls' uniforms are plausible in a military fantasy (or Cuban Rebel Girl) style, and the sense of depth and distance is entirely believable; this is a great picture! Lots of fun!

I take it you constructed this set, which conveys a sense of a very large space, in relatively tight quarters? Impressive work.

Did you use insulation foam for the wall sections? What tools did you use for carving and shaping?

The material is 1" thick foam insulation that my local Home Depot store sells in 2' by 2' sections.
https://www.homedepot.ca/product/owens-corning-foamular-24-inch-x-24-inch-foam-insulation-project-panel-mold-and-moisture-resistant/1000845392

Tools are an X-Acto knife with #11 blade, a steel ruler, a graphite pencil, tin-foil balls to give the stone texture and various paint brushes.

Ovy wrote:I am back..u!

Let me dissect.

(Everything in CAPSU is to be read with a deep loud Japanese accent in your heads)

CHAPTER I

SAMURAI KOMANDERU

Yes, this is one  beautiful dude.

After delving into the Chinese side of historical armor and weaponry for fantasy purposes first, I also became interested in Japan again recently. Partly your fault, haha, although it's some hundred years earlier.

These little 'lamellae' held together by string/cord are what frighten me the most about delving into self creating Japanese inspired fantasy stuff. While other complicated materials like chainmail can mostly be hidden or marginalized with plate and padding, these inconic lamellae looks just have to be somewhere for the mood. Stringing together a suit out of little squares would be a great and fun project, but also might kill my brain and time like so many other projects, haha.
So it makes sense these are offered as cheaper one piece molds.
Also interesting a Hideyoshi armor can still be used in the period you are depicting. But I could also see some European 16th century cuirasses used on characters living hundreds of years later.

Overall, great authorative aura this guy. Especially in combination with the other soldiers.

CHAPTER II

HACHIMAKI BOI

If it really is about age, just be glad he isn't 99 or something. Really appreciate the OCD patience of making it all right and accurate with the squares. Just skill an patience or do you use particular tools? I see myself creating ugly frizzy cut up edges when attempting this.

While the body armor does seem to look differently on the show, I really like the color combo of reddish brown and blue here.

I actually like these Ashigaru body armors more than  the complicated strung together ones from the samurai. There are some segmented 'tassets' and 'pauldrons' held together by string but it's not too complicated, which I like. The fantasy armor I would bash one day would look more like Ashigaru I guess.

Btw, do you know your way around realistic Japanese head sculpts? I really can't find many on ebay etc. Actually I only found Takeshi Kitano yet. In three hair colours, haha.


CHAPTER III

FUTSOLDIERU

Ooh, that hat + strappings! It might look minor, but could you imagine him with just a simple leather strap? No, that would look wrong. Great job and detail attention.
And that solid chin beard is really a great help in holding the strings together I think.

Also really like this 'one piece' Ashigaru body armor, despite the anachronism (I wouldn't have known there was one if you didn't mention it).


CHAPTER IV

YAE

Kinda dejavueish..deja..vesque...to see someone's 'favourite' figure being reworked again and again, haha. And beating yourself up because having taken shortcuts. (Something I am doing too, recently.)
Speaking of which, these beautiful gloves are great, wanted to do something like this leather adding/lenghtening for a while now, with almost the same gloves. (But with adding armor finger segments).

Again, love how you found these tiny tiny flowers matching the show's right armband.

I made first thumb-up-like of video picture movie film!
The first transition makes her look like from a video game or animation show.
6 hours for one photo?? Yeah that's insane dedication.
Glad I am a normal person. Now let me get back to finding the right curve angle for the belly armor segment I am working on, so it can bend correctly when the character is sitting. After 4 prototypes I think I might be onto something.

CHAPTER V

BURIZKERIGARU

One minor critque though, already mentioned it earlier, I think you overran/steamrolled/blitzkrieged us with so many releases of so many figures happening at the same time. It is so much all at once, this mega release took away from each individual figure which could be appreciated in more depth otherwise. Now they are a team which is great, but I could have more easily processed it in smaller bits haha.

Wow, thanks for this amazingly in-depth and supportive response Ovy! I will respond to your response ( ) in order:

CHAPTER I

SAMURAI KOMANDERU

Yes, this is one  beautiful dude.

Ha, you know, I had a feeling that my least favorite figure and one that I spent the least amount of effort on would get a great response (not just from you, a few others have mentioned him above too). I think the intricate pattern even when just painted on can seem impressive, but this one was so poorly done I weathered the hell out of it to try to hide how sloppy the paint job was (look closely and you can see how splotchy and messy it is; just terrible; I did better when I was 12). But, it was cheap, less than $100 for the body, clothes and armor. (The arm armor is from the PopToys ashigaru and is well done, if a little narrow and tight.) BTW if you really want to get into accurate lamellar samurai armor the recent sets put out by PopToys and COO look spectacular, with all that "stringing" done for you, but it will cost quite a bit (looks like they start around $300 and climb up over 400 really quick). But thanks for the compliment, glad you like his "authoritativeness." 

And yes, in the bakumatsu period (end of the Edo era), samurai still had armor that was completely unchanged from the beginning of the Edo era 260 years prior, so any armor that's made for the Warring States period can be applicable to this time period as well. Helmets are a slightly different thing, but there are pictures of the old style and elaborate helmets being used even after the Boshin war, during the Satsuma rebellion (1877), made famous by The Last Samurai. But during this period, many samurai were starting to dress in Western style uniforms so there was a real mix. That's what makes it so fascinating and cool to depict.

CHAPTER II

HACHIMAKI BOI

Yes, the squares were cut out completely free hand, using nothing more than a small scalpel blade (#12) for my X-acto knife (#11 blade doesn't work well here). Of course I measured carefully and marked them out so the cuts followed the lines, but it just takes practice and patience. It's hardly perfect under magnification, you can see some rough edges, but once again, naked eye is good enough!

And you mentioned that the armor is different from what the boys wore, but actually, it is exactly the same style that a few of them did wear! There were several different types, but at least two or three of them wore exactly this style. Here's that pic from before:

If you look at the boy on the far right, and the third from right, they are in fact wearing exactly this style, same shape and color (you have to enlarge the pic to see it better; also I have video evidence but it's too much work for me to go back and hunt for the right screen caps). The boy second from right has a similar style but with a different top "fork" where the shoulders start. And of course, the biggest boy on the steps wears totally different armor. The big difference is, for the boys who do wear this exact pattern, they are only wearing the front half because they are so small the full armor would have been huge on them! So the production team put the front part on their chests and bent the armor around their sides, and then tied it together with rope around the back. You can see a bit of that in this pic, also previously posted:


As far as Japanese headsculpts, it was a struggle finding them myself. The tough part is getting ones with the right hair pattern and also age. I needed to find as many clean shaven ones as possible and there are virtually none.

CHAPTER III

FUTSOLDIERU

Thanks so much for appreciating the hat and the chinstrap pattern! It seems so minor and simple but it's all about the details.

If I really wanted to be accurate with the cuirass I would have sewed or glued some fabric pattern and then glued about 30-50 small rectangular plates to it, but I thought this one was "good enough." Plus, I hate waste and if I didn't use this cuirass I probably would have never used it for anything else.

CHAPTER IV

YAE

Yup, sometimes you need to be obsessed with something if it really matters to you! That's the kind of project this has been for me. Thank you for mentioning the details like the gloves (the key is blending the colors so they look contiguous).

And yes, six hours, which didn't count the 2-4 hours of photoediting which came afterward so that it looked as close as possible to the production photo.

CHAPTER V

BURIZKERIGARU

Shouldn't that be ブリッつくリーグ ?  

I do take your criticism to heart, and wonder if that's why not many people are bothering to comment here, other than you loyal and stalwart few who have. It's probably smarter to do one thread per figure, rather than appending each new update to one massive thread, and of course to space them out a bit. I get on a roll and I do like the "archive" quality of one big thread, but it may not be user friendly. My thread has garnered over 1600 views, but only about 15 people have actually commented on it, and I'm noticing there are some frequent posters on this board who are ignoring it entirely. Must not be their cup of tea. Oh well. Perhaps they really do think my work sucks, or I irritate them somehow (I wouldn't be surprised). I'm kinda old school in my modeling approach, which seems to clash with the way people are putting figures together these days, so maybe that's it. Who knows, I'm still grateful to be hearing from people like you, and I thank you sincerely for your always thoughtful comments.

Part I

Making a neck connector from a Staedtler art eraser.  It works to solve two problems:  

1. Ball joint on the skeleton is too small for standard neck connector and :  

2.  Neck connector is very loose in the head and you don't want to glue it.  

IMG_2993 by Gary  Menten, on Flickr

Here's what you'll need.  

1. Soft plastic art eraser such as the Staedtler line.

2. X-Acto knife with #11 blade.

3. drugstore type sandpaper nail files.  

4. drill bits of appropriate sizes.  

5.  small, round or semi-round file.  

IMG_2995 by Gary  Menten, on Flickr

1.  Place a plastic neck connector on the eraser to measure how much you have to cut from the eraser. Cut carefully and slowly; the blade wanders easily.


IMG_2997 by Gary  Menten, on Flickr

2.  Using the neck connector to measure in length now, trim off the excess length with the knife.  



IMG_2999 by Gary  Menten, on Flickr

Using your hobby knife, cut the corners off the block of plastic so as to have an octagonal shape.  Your geometry does not need to be perfect here.  Test the fit into the head as you go along. You want it to be snug.


3. Using your file, sand the corners of your octagon to get them as even as possible then take your hobby knife and start a pilot hole for the drill bits. Using a succession of drill bits bits, dill a progressively larger hole into the center of the adapter. Drill all the way to the end.  Be careful to keep your "tunnel" as straight as possible.  Using a hobby knife, bevel both ends of the tunnel, leaving the middle tighter.  The lower bevel helps to insert the ballhead without breaking the soft plastic and the top bevel gives it a bit of space to breathe, so to speak after you've pushed the ball joint all the way through.  

IMG_3005 by Gary  Menten, on Flickr

4.  Carefully place the connector on the ball head and pull it down with your fingers wrapped around it.  when placed it should look like in the photo. You are now ready to put the head on the figure.  If you've fitted it properly to the head, friction will keep it in place and the walls of the hole in the head should help keep it from breaking, as should the top bevel.  I can pick up this figure by the head and the body will not fall off.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask me .

Okay, a small confession; I've been building this figure's outfit from bits and pieces of stuff parted out from sets to achieve the look I want, and up until this past Thursday, she was completely without footwear. Then finally the Agent Skye boots I ordered arrived and now, she is approaching completion, or at least ready to patrol the streets of some post apocalyptic trading town in the southwest of the US, which is where my little 1/6th scale fantasy mercenary company will operate during the period known to historians as "The Great Anarchy."

20190126_0186 by Gary  Menten, on Flickr

I wanted lace-up boots because this is one of the newer TB League smaller figures (S24A) and I reasoned that even if the boots were too big for her, I'd be able to compensate by lacing them up tight.  You can judge for yourselves if I was correct. The boots do appear a little oversize at the feet of course, but there wasn't much I could do about that.  I also wanted tall boots, because Rod Taylor wears tall lace-up leather boots in the film Dark of The Sun, which heavily inspired the style of the uniform for this doll, and because I reasoned that operation in the American Southwest, where rattlesnakes abound, tall leather boots would be seen as better protection from snakebite than standard issue desert boots, plus...would be a hell of a lot more fashionable to this very fashion conscious mercenary unit.

20190126_0178 by Gary  Menten, on Flickr

Overall, I'm pleased with them, though I suppose that being faux leather and from comments I've read from others, should be thoroughly washed lest they stain the figure, they will be coming off shortly for that purpose. After that, I'll have to grunge them up a bit...actually dust them up a bit, to make it look like our girl has been out on patrol. If anyone has any suggestion as to the best way of doing this, please feel free to speak up. One other point that should be made, it it's not immediately obvious to everyone, is that this sort of boot does restrict the movements of the ankle joint somewhat and can make some poses difficult to achieve. The one below took a bit of work for sure...

20190126_0181 by Gary  Menten, on Flickr


Finally, since this figure represents a member of an organized military / mercenary unit, raised and trained by a retired officer, I decided to give her a rank, (corporal) and given my own military background and stylistic preferences, decided her chevrons should be on the British / Commonwealth style and pointing downwards. They were made by using small sections of 2 mm white tape supplied by Antheads co. in the UK glued to a piece of khaki drill fabric that had first been stiffened by applying a fabric adhesive to the other side and allowing it to dry.  This also made it much easier to cut without threads parting in every direction. A template was then applied to the other side and the shape of the backing was drawn in pencil before being cut out with a sharp #11 Exacto blade.  Tiny little strips of tape were then glued onto the backing and cut down to size once the glue had dried. Finally, the completed set of chevrons was glued to the shirt. Again, comments welcome.

20190126_0162 by Gary  Menten, on Flickr

The figure is not quite complete however.  I can't imagine her patrolling in the southwest without a canteen. Also, she needs an edged weapon, and I think the perfect one would be the Dragon bayonet for the L1A1 rifle. I saw one parted out someplace and the same bayonet was designed in real life at least, to fit the Sterling SMG as well. I know, because I carried both the Canadian versions of both the rifle and sub machine gun in the Canadian Army.  I think she also needs a pouch for a least a few spare mags for her Sterling.  I'd also like to attach a lanyard between the butt of her pistol and her belt, but first have to find some string the right size.  I don't want to stick too much on her. I think less is more in this case. Again...opinions welcome.