Saturday 10 November 2012

Some Construction Required - Kirai and Crew

Some construction required continues this month with the low down on assembly points if you're looking at putting together a Kirai crew.

First up, here's my Kirai crew as it stands. I'd found some bamboo bases care of Malcontent's effort that looked just perfect. Bamboo as I found out however if fairly difficult to drill into. You tend to find your drill bit slipping until it finds a recess between two bamboo sections. It's just a little fiddlier.



Kirai isn't really an issue to assemble but her avatar form was a different story. I fumbled with the join between Kirai and her spirit form for hours before deciding that there wasn't a good join and a whole lot of green stuff was going to be required.

I had to enlist the help of a friend with significant experience with green stuff shaping to extend the spirits dress, rework the shoulder and he even extended kirai's hair to make it more natural in its position on the bamboo.



Next up were the Shikome with their ridicoulsy long upper arms. I tried to give them two different poses, because I hate duplicate sculpts but both needed strong pinning to achieve.




It goes without saying that you'll need to bend and dry fit until you have a good pose before pinning. I had to pin almost all the way through the chest cavity before I was happy with the strength of the join.

Last up were the Gaki and I'm glad I only opted to do two of these. The shoulder joints were quite fiddly and had to be gently drilled out. You have to drill into the shoulder, not the chest, meaning you don't have a lot of space to work with. It was as I was doing this and dry fitting the arms that I realised how unnatural the pose of the fitted arms would be. A quick bit of web research showed most accept this and I even began to think of this as the natural pose, until I finally looked at the Wyrd web store. There the poses looked a lot more natural and I came to the conclusion that the arms needed to be bent and repositioned to get the same, or at the least, a more natural pose. Some tweaking later and here they are with a little liquid green stuff to fill out the join at the upper bicep.




Well now Kirai and her minions are all assembled its time to turn my attention to Nicodem and his crew of lackeys. Hopefully I'll be able to smash them out before Xmas, in which case I'll share a similar article soon.

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