DREWspective

Some very exciting news about the project has surfaced in the last couple of days. Unfortunately none of it involves receiving any money as yet.

First of all, the bad news: because of copyright issues on my part, I will not be posting any more photos of the work in progress until after they’re complete. (I know nobody who reads DREWspective has ever stolen an idea from anyone, ever.)

Now the good news, and there’s plenty of it. The first bit of good news goes as follows…

Remember that decal paper I bought a while back? Well, I’ve had the idea of using it to transfer designs for the chibiMon’s faces, instead of risking drawing them in pencil, painting over the outlines and getting it wrong.

I’ve done a trial run with one model and it’s worked. The only drawback is that the decal didn’t stick down as well as I’d liked, so you can still see pockets of air. It might have something to do with the head being made out of low density (LD) polystyrene.

The second bit of good news is that I may have figured out how to make the legs.

Last week I bought some 12mm balsa wood dowel, and have begun cutting it into 3cm lengths. Fortunately balsa wood can be cut using an ordinary craft knife, so there was arguably no real need to buy that rotary tool.

(However, a trip to Hobbycraft yesterday revealed that the exact same kit was selling for £120 - four times the price I bought it for! It turns out that, for most items, Hobbycraft is actually more expensive than smaller art shops.)

Now it’s just the feet I’m concerned about; though I plan to cut some tiny polystyrene egg shapes in half, they may not be big enough to accommodate the dowel. If I had access to a lathe, things might be simpler.

The third bit of good news is to do with the arms. Yesterday I was at Hobbycraft, yet again, to get some art straws (necessary for sticking material onto). Having hovered around the polystyrene shapes section yet again, I came across packs of compressed cotton balls. These were perfect for making the hands: not only were they not perfect spheres, soft and flexible, and the right size, but they had holes in them already. To boot, they probably don’t need a coat of primer either.
Unfortunately I also have more polystyrene balls in the post, as I had gotten far too impatient with making the arms. Not a problem, because I could always sell them.

The fourth bit is quite a groundbreaking discovery: it turns out that funky foam can be moulded using an embossing heat tool. After a trial run last night while dressing one of the chibiMon, it appears to work; I was able to stretch the foam to size, though it took some work to get it in place.
This means that it might be possible to make the weird and interesting hairdos without using copious amounts of Fimo or some other material. We shall see.

You know what? I wrote a whole article about this from the draft I did last week. But the weblog editor fucked up and didn’t save anything, so I’m going to leave it.

Over a pub lunch, I was trying to figure out how to make the legs. The difficulty came with the fact that the legs are slanted a little bit.

I came up with a couple of solutions:

• Obtain some polystyrene/wood tubes, cut them down to size and stick discs at the top to create the wide part of the legs. This would have the advantage of making sturdy legs, but the disadvantage of requiring yet more materials (and buying at least a hacksaw).

• Make a structure for one leg using some tough card, and strategically wrap funky foam around it to create the illusion of a partial cylinder. Two of these would be stuck back to back to create two "legs". The major advantage would be the use of existing materials; the disadvantages being time-consuming measuring and cutting, as well as the risk of uneven and wobbly legs.

I gave the second method a try, as it was the least expensive and immediately executable. While it was very time-consuming and hard to cut the card to the right shape, the result was rather pleasing (photo above). One rather important matter became evident: the foam would have to be cut perfectly to make this method work.

The journey continues…!