Serenity GK - WIP - Base

When I decided to give Serenity her manga, silver hair I looked for images of her (in that palette) online. Didn't find anything helpful as far as the dress or the coloring were concerned but I did find Daekazu's Serenity and thought it might be nice to try something similar to those pillars, on the base. Later on I gave up on the idea of adding moon phases on the pillars for the simple reason that they would've taken up a lot of space and would've looked fake, since creating those shapes sculpturally would've been so much harder than drawing them... I thought a bit about how I wanted to make those flowery designs on, well, the sticks. Painting them on would've given me a lot more liberty and the resulting designs would've been prettier, but since they wouldn't've stood out from the rest of the surface I feared they would come out looking like a print (rather than something sculptural). So I used Tamiya putty to add them to the sticks and then silver paint over the putty. Here are some in-process photos of the base. Enjoy! :)

Serenity GK - WIP - Dress

The dress came out okay in the end... I didn't like how it looked with the first closing method, so I took that section apart and instead attached long ribbons and a couple of shoulder straps. I did think of sewing on some of that white-beige fabric onto the straps to create the same effect of Serenity's round spiraly sleeves, but to be frank ,I never understood the role of those things or how they would ever be properly attached to her shoulders in real life (other than them being made of plastic and stuck to her shoulders with like, super-glue or smth)... I still have to properly sew certain parts of it... but for now it's working just fine, won't be coming apart anytime soon and looks okay (well, best I can do, in any case). A few photos of the dress:

Serenity GK - WIP

Back in fall 2010 I was surfing the net, minding my own business... and then suddenly I come across this pretty pretty figurine of Princess Serenity from Sailor Moon. As most of those who know me have already found out, I am somewhat of a "SailorMoon-fan-in-denial" - so just looking at it and saying "she's pretty" and moving on wasn't going to be the easiest thing I've ever done. Searching for some more info about her, I found out that she's a "garage kit" released in 1994 and long out of stock everywhere... And that even if she were in stock, these things cost WAY too much for me to able to afford an original garage kit... But I also found a nice Chinese site called E2046. The people there do "recasts" of original kits (many of which are either sold out or never even released as unassembled kits). I've noticed that people are against recasts (to be frank, I'd be pretty pissed off if someone made money off of MY sculpture, too) but I'm happy I found these guys, cause otherwise I would never have afforded to have her.

Assembling Serenity was unexpectedly fun: I got to sand her 'till she was smooth and nice, and then I drilled holes into the resin and used metallic wire and Poxipol to pin her up... and when that was done I used Tamiya putty (which I got from a Romanian website and which, paradoxically, arrived with many more complications than the parcel from freaking Hong Kong!) to cover up all the uneven spots and make it look like she had always been made from one piece. I missed a spot on her back, where one of her hands meets the torso, and unfortunately I didn't notice 'till after I was done with applying the paint and the shadings. But it's not that much of a defect, so it's not worth trying to fix it and causing more damage (which I'm pretty sure is what I'd end up doing).

I used a mixture of acrylic paints for her skin - one that I was very amused was identical to the color of the foundation I use. And for the hair I decided I wanted to give her a silver-ish manga color (white just looked odd to me). The dress she came with was pretty horrible, so I decided I would try my hand at making a better one - and in the meantime I managed to LOSE the original dress, as well. I'm not done with the dress yet (not with the base that I just HAD to start building, either), but here are some "work in progress" pics for you guys...

I didn't take any photos while I was sanding, priming, assembling, puttying and so on. The idea came to me only after I'd painted the skin tone and started doing the shading (for which, by the way, I used pastel chalk - worked like a charm).

Enjoy!



















The picture above is not the final look of the figure. I modified a few things and added some small stuff... But I'll post some more when I have the dress ready.

See you guys later :)