kiyakotari | Entries tagged with photography

Here are some more of my junk eyes. I'm still having problems with air bubbles, particularly during the doming process. All of these eyes have imperfections that make them unsaleable. The purple eye is the worst - it shifted in the pressure pot during the curing process, and the dome ended up moving WAY off-center, so it looks like it has some kind of growth. The darker blue eye was a test subject for several different things, including touching the resin before it was fully cured to see what would happen. The answer? Lots of tiny, tiny gouges in the surface of the dome that make the eye look cloudy. The light blue eye actually turned out the best, but again has bubbles in it. For some reason, the clear resin isn't responding well to the pressure pot (not de-bubbling, surface texture going "wonky"), while the white resin does just fine in it. I'm really hoping I can solve the bubble issue without having to build a vacuum chamber. Building the pressure pot was difficult (and expensive) enough!

Since these are junk eyes, I probably won't bother removing the stems from the back. For the eyes I actually intend on selling, the backs will be removed, resulting in a flat-backed/half-round eye.

My eyes have improved by leaps and bounds over the last few weeks. You may remember these prototype eyes that I shared a while back. The eyes below are the exact same pair, with some updates. (They're junk versions, full of bubbles and stuff, but I've tried a few different techniques on them and learned what I do and do not like, as far as results go.)

Getting close to the finish line, now.

Because it's snowing, and I work at a college that has a small Japanese garden on campus, I slapped a kimono onto Darryl and brought him to work with the intention of taking photos in the snow.

Of course, by the time I actually got to work, it was raining and windy.

So instead, I took him into the tatami room next to the garden and shot a couple of quick photos.

( Two more under the cut. )

We're, uh, not going to talk about the fact that it's a fairly girly kimono.

Talon, Darryl, and Rupali have a little chat.

(This is just an excuse to take pictures, don't read too much into it.)

( Four more photos. )

Like several of my other dolls, Talon has recently undergone an upgrade to a more realistic and mature sculpt. I'm really, really ecstatic with how well he turned out.

He looks great with Darryl, too. ^__^

( Three more photos under here. )

I broke out one of my photography backdrops, and finally got a chance to take a couple of shots of the new Wren and Darryl together. Still getting the hang of this DSLR. It's a doozy, and way more complicated than my previous cameras. It took me ten minutes today just to figure out how to turn off the flash!

I really need to start on the backdrop stand that I've been intending to build. These things make my photos look so much better. I want to get more backdrops, too.

Darryl's head is quite a bit more yellow than his body right now (though the difference is more pronounced in pictures than in person), but I have no doubt that will change as the body mellows. It's currently still paper white.

Just a one shot. Darryl's new self finally has eyes (of a sort). They're urethane prototypes that I made a few months ago, and have some problems, but they'll do for now.

A small selection of a bunch of photos from months and months ago, taken at Cornwall Park, a few blocks from my old apartment.

( More photos under the cut. )

It's probably been 10 or more years since I baked anything. We had some bananas laying around that were ripe to the point of being almost solid black-brown, so I mentioned to James that maybe I would bake some banana bread rather than throwing them out. Well, he got this wonderful, dewy expression on his face, so after that I pretty much had to make the bread. However, my recipe calls for three to four or more bananas, and we only had two. Thus, I modified my recipe, leaving out the chocolate chips and substituting a couple of cups of frozen blueberries to replace the moisture normally supplied by the two missing bananas.

I don't know yet how it will taste, because I'm waiting for James to get home from work before de-panning and cutting into the loaf, but it smells delicious.

The loaf is so dark because I sprinkled brown sugar on it before baking to give it a nice, crunchy-sweet top. The weight and extra moisture of the blueberries kept the loaf from really rising, but I'm okay with that. I prefer heavy, thick breads, anyway.

We're, uh, not going to talk about the "domestication" jokes James and I were trading back and forth while I mixed this.

I'm just going to leave this here.

I made a dreadlocked wig for Rupali. It still needs some work, but I'm pleased with the results thus far. (Rupali wears her hair short, but in her downtime she sometimes puts on a wig with big, chunky dreads.)

( Look under the cut for another shot of Rupali, a couple pictures of Zsuzsa, and two photos of Darryl 2.0. )

Several people have asked me how I made the floor of my Uncanny Dream set. The short answer is "blood and sweat" (there were no tears), but I also took some progress shots.

( More progress photos under the cut. )

I am completely beat, but the show was awesome. There were so many people that for a while it was practically standing room only. I put up pictures of the displays on DoA, but here are some more detail photos of my diorama. I wasn't able to finish all the parts I wanted, but I'm pleased with how it turned out. I'll keep adding to it and tweaking it, and use it for a photo set.

I'll start off with a shot of Ǝrəšiš. She was displayed alone, on a pedestal in the middle of the exhibition room.

( More photos, all stupidly large. )

Several of my heads are currently out for faceups, and I just got preview pictures of Hunter. He's looking just how I had envisioned him. Now if only I could find him a more suitable wig...

Rupali has returned from her visit to Lyn Raftis, and is definitely rocking her new faceup. I'm in love with this. Lyn took my sketchy "I kinda' want her to look professional, but also casual, and I want her lips red but not too red, more like reddish, and her eyebrows black and nice, but really just do whatever you want" and turned it into EXACTLY what I wanted. She's a miracle worker, really. And just in time for me to get my gal all put back together again and ensconced safely in the WUNPO-crew doll cabinet before I go under the knife next week. DOUBLE WIN!

I do apologize for the crappy photo. I snapped it quickly at work, and the lighting here sucks. (Also, I think I will get a new camera this year. My point-and-shoot just...isn't cutting it anymore.)

It's been a while since I've posted anything! I've been pretty busy, but am currently snowed-in on a day off from work, and have some time.

In news, on December 26th I was unexpectedly landed with a new family member. It's a long story, but this is one of the three cats that belonged to Jae and Steph back when we used to share an apartment. I've always adored her, and when she needed a new home the day after Christmas, I took her in (and with only a couple of hours of advance notice, too). She's adapting well to the new environment - although the introductions did mean lots of hissing and growling and general cat unhappiness in my little one-bedroom apartment for a while there. She and MingMing have now settled into a mutual avoidance routine, for the most part, with only the occasional "Oh, yeah, I'm not happy you're here," hiss for the sake of appearances. Both have lived in multiple-cat homes before, so I have no doubt that they will eventually warm up to one another enough to cuddle up together.

Anyhow, without further delay, I present Kamikaze, also known as "Kami." (Previously known as "Dizzy," a name that I've always hated, and which she seemed quite happy to abandon - she responded to "Kami" without any hesitation.)

( More under the link, as well as some of MingMing, and a single shot of Waldere. )

Rupali arrived yesterday. Her head is going out to Lyn Raftis for a faceup this week, but here's a quick-and-dirty shot of her anyway. ^__^

I was without a computer for the last two weeks of November, thanks to a failure in my power adapter and then some shipping issues. So I've been pretty limited in what I could do online until this last weekend when the new adapter arrived, as I only had an iPod and a Kindle to access the internet on. ^_^;; Have you ever tried to write HTML on an iPod? It's possible, but NOT easy. So while the website framework is done now, I've still got a lot of content to create, write, and upload. But that's the easy part. I'm pleased with the progress I made despite the limitations of the tiny touchscreen, though!

Here are two quick shots of Ha-Neul, as requested. He needs new eyes, new hair, and new clothes, but I adore him all the same.

( And one more. )

Just a quick shot of TinyLizard being tiny and cute on my finger. Under a cut because it's fairly wide.

( Look, TinyLizard is posturing at the camera! Isn't it cute? )

Here are some shots of other pets. ^___^

Enkidu, the Hyla cinerea (American green tree frog) that lives with Gilgamesh and Manimekalai in the large "anole terrarium." They get along beautifully - that is to say, the anoles and the frog totally ignore each other.

( Two more under here. )

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Kiyakotari

February 2012

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D A T A L O G

Entries tagged with photography

Junk Eyes

Making Progress

The Tatami Room

Conversations

Talon 2.0

Wren and Darryl

Darryl 2.0

Rupali in Cornwall Park

Blueberry Banana Bread

Wren 2.0

In Which Rupali Wears Dreads, Zsuzsa Glitters, and Darryl (2.0) Looks Disturbingly Like Motoko

Uncanny Dream Diorama: Floor WIP Images

Uncanny Dream: Articulated Fantasy 2011

Hunter Preview

Rupali - Now With 80% More Face!!

Cats (and a lizard), oh my!

Rupali

Pictures of Ha-Neul

TinyLizard One-Shot

A break from TinyLizard spam.

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February 2012

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