I Done Did It

Yesterday, day two or three of the month, I'm not sure how to track it since I am a day ahead of the U.S., I finally started on Anubis, my model for NaMoPaiMo.

I decided that the first order of business was to go ahead a do the reverse nose job I had been considering.  (build up the bridge of his nose)

Since joining the herd, he has been living here, in the box he arrived in.

With his lady friend.

This was the safest place I could think of for him to stay, here in earthquake land.

However, it's time to come out and get fixed up!

In the middle of the mess that also, er, needs to be fixed up.

I did decide to at least clear a bigger space on the desk.

Okay, back to work.

First, I decided that some "before" pictures were in order.

In the middle of this, my supervisor arrived and demanded to know what I was doing,

Moving on with the impromptu photo shoot, sans cat.

Okay, he's bee documented.  "Now what?" he seems to be saying.

'Now what' is I discovered that the reason he seems "tippy" is, this.

So even without the possibility of altering his face, it looks like some apoxy work would have been in order anyway.

After a good once over, we were off to the kitchen, for a bath.

Then back to the studio, I got out some pictures from my ridiculous reference collection.  I decided not to follow any certain picture individually, but wanted to get an idea in my head of a profile with a slight "dish" to it.

Enough preparing, time to really get to work.

I always like to give apoxy/epoxy something to grip, so I did some cross hatching with my exacto knife.

Then I mixed a small ball of apoxy (very well!) and got underway.

No pictures of the actual sculpting process, but here's what I ended up with.

Hmm...  I struggled to judge the results, but the contrast in color made that hard.

Despite mixing a "small" amount of apoxy, I ended up having enough for his hooves too.  But I had to work fast.  Again, no pictures of that, but I did my cross hatching on the bottom of each hoof, then made four small disks of apoxy, putting then on the bottom of his hooves and sort of pushing him into them - in an attempt to make the base of all four hooves even and straight. I stood him on wax paper for all of this.

Now there was  nothing left to do, but wait for his face ad feet to dry before I can evaluate the results.

I didn't want to leave him standing up (earthquakes) but couldn't lay him down while his hooves are drying.  So this is what I came up with: a temporary stall of sorts.

The whole process took much less time than I had thought.  I'd figured I'd spend the afternoon working on him, but when the apoxy is drying there wasn't much I could do.  I didn't want to mess up the bottoms of his hooves by messing around with him.

I was all set up in the studio and nothing to work on...?  Ha!  Silly me.

I decided to work on the Stablemate Arabian costume that I started a bit ago.  Progress on it came to a halt when I'd realized I couldn't go much further without a saddle tree.  Well, I blew that excuse out of the water recently, when I made not one, but several SM Arabian saddle trees!

This first costume is intended for the G1 Arab Stallion, so I covered one of those saddles with fabric.

Then I finished work on the panels, edging them with braided floss.

I set them up to be pressed and found myself waiting on something else to dry.

Encouraged by a bit of progress - and with several other saddles now available - I spent a big of time digging through my new fabric collection (something I started collecting when I decided that I wanted to finally start making costumes) looking for patterns suitable for SM scale. I came up with pieces for 6-8 more SM scale Arabian costumes.

I ended the day by putting a couple of quick coats of white acrylic on Anubis's face, to try and better see where he ended up.

I think he's looking good!

I have some work to do on the edges on the near side, and ALL the rest of his prep to do - plus sanding down the excess on his hooves and building one of them up a bit more.  I had hoped to have him prepped or nearly so before we leave on our trip tomorrow, but I don't think that's going to happen.

Overall, I'm quite happy with yesterday's (small)  progress!