running off of pure mac n cheese

i like bugs, les mis, d&d, making dubiously functional clothing from scraps, worldbuilding, dollmaking, TMA, space and conlangs. All of these subjects are currently playing ping pong with my minuscule attention span

[eldritchseaslug]

some enjoltaire sketches for a vaguely arcane-inspired au I’m writing. I’m not Ai I just can’t be bothered to draw hands rn

the fic is here if anyone wants to read it. not sure if I’ll continue, I’ve hit the literal worst writers block of my entire life and my motivation is in hell smoking weed with satan

[eldritchseaslug]

my older sibling finally bought themself a car and ive inherited the one they used before. it’s been in the family for literally decades and I dissed it at first because it is literally on its last wheels, but holy shit, this is the best car I’ve ever fucking driven. it was so smooth, and honestly worth the trade off of it having no ac and the ominous creaking noise that’s coming from the hood that even the mechanics can’t figure out. the steering actually worked and it didn’t feel like I was wrangling a fucking beast every time I stepped on the gas. moral of the story: buy used cars. I have apologised to the car profusely for doubting her and I’ve named her Beth.

[eldritchseaslug]

Here’s the finished nikola doll!

I really like how she turned out. She’s about 20 1/2 centimeters, or 8ish inches. Of course there’s a few issues. her legs have a really hard time staying straight and she can’t stand at all but I don’t really care. I’ll make her a doll stand at some point. now I just need to make her outfit, my design ideas are under the cut

I tried ti add some jester-like elements to her outfit. it may or may not be because I don’t know what a ringmaster is supposed to look like. I’m probably going to get rid of the striped bloomers, I think they’re competing with the tailcoat too much in the design. They also might not even work in miniature but I’ll start with the sleeves and go from there.

since this bjd sculpting went so well, I think I might try sculpting another avatar. I want to continue with the less human-shaped ones, so Michael (distortion) and Helen are probably next. the only problem with that is that I’ll have to actually make hands this time. after that maybe I’ll have a go at making Jon or Gerard or something.

[eldritchseaslug]

was going to be on the road for a while and I didn’t have a craft to do so I took a panic trip to the nearest craft store and bought a bunch of beads and not once during this process did I realize that a car was probably the worst possible place to be doing my first ever bead embroidery.

ayway this is about five hours of work. hopefully it will eventually be a skirt for a custom doll but we’ll see.

[eldritchseaslug]

painted the nikola head!

the photo is shit but I’m very happy with her. she looks sufficiently horrifying

[eldritchseaslug]

had a dream a few nights ago that a bunch of scientists tried to save the kakapo parrot jurassic-park style and combined its dna with a few dinosaurs and it ended up growing an extra set of legs and became about the size of a great dane and became an extremely invasive species across the entire world. i don’t even remember them having a name, tehy just escaped the lab en masse and everyone took to calling them “the bastards” because of how much havoc they caused. anyway the bastards looked something like this:

looks nothing like the source material. in my dream one took up residence inside my car and built a nest inside and wouldn’t let me in at all. i dont even own a car irl

[eldritchseaslug]

The sculpted and sanded head I made for my Nikola doll. Making the embodiment of uncanny valley as my first doll was a great idea, since most of my mistakes sort of just add to the overall look.

[eldritchseaslug]

tried out some suede to see if it helps with any of the awkwardness. also used some proper elastic this time as well and it made a very large difference. it’s amazing what can happen if you actually use the right materials to make something. wild stuff. I’ll probably only suede the leg joints, I managed to get the arms to fit together fairly well with some alterations. I’ve got a prototype head for Nikola, but she is looking ROUGH so I’m going to wait to post that one.

[eldritchseaslug]

decided to final colour some old sketches of Dezzi

I like how they turned out though I’m pretty unhappy about the top left drawing. I think I messed up on the hair a bit, but it was also really hard to find a reference for what I was going for. this hairstyle exists istg. also used this as an excuse to draw Kayla and Aster happy. Dezzi was probably the only other person besides maybe Gianni who was strong enough to give them piggyback rides as they got older

[eldritchseaslug]

favorite animal?

@favorite-animal-person

oh boy i have a lot. hmm. I have a few favourite animals for every category of animal, but I can’t really choose between them so…

fav mammal: muntjac barking deer or the short-beaked echidna

fav fish: thresher shark or ribbon eel

fav bird: American purple gallinule or great-eared nightjar

fav bug: giant isopod or Madagascan moon moth or huntsman spider

fav amphibian: the Olm

fav reptile: Barbados threadsnake or thorny devil

bonus: pilot whale and Ceratosoma moloch

[eldritchseaslug]

so I finally sanded and test-strung my bjd…

And it is definitely a test. The tension is super weird (probably because I used rubber bands), the legs turn in a bunch of weird ways, and I thought I could get away with minimal sanding (I cannot). I wanted it to be flexible, but not THIS flexible. the doll can’t hold a pose at all, and the arms especially tend to snap into a closed position a lot. I think I can fix most of these problems with (unfortunaltely) more sanding. I was hoping to avoid needing to add locks to the knee joints but I think I might have to in order to stop the swiveling. I also might try sueding. I kind of like how freaky it looks since it is going to eventually be a character from a horror show, but I’d like to at least make the doll slightly more realistic first.

[eldritchseaslug]

I keep forgetting that I listened to the majority of the Magnus archives while working at a food pantry and sometimes when I decide to re-listen I get viscerally reminded of the time I was organising the meat freezers while listening to Jon get his ribs taken.

[eldritchseaslug]

Finally have all the parts sculpted. The forearms are in the next picture and I kept them separate so they can dry, I only just finished sculpting.

If anyone is interested in my very janky sculpting process, I sculpted all the parts that need to be hollow on knitting needles. I have a dremel but it’s a bit broken so it doesnt do well with hollowing things out. I also covered the knitting needles in masking tape so that nothing gets stuck. Yes I did learn that the hard way, and now I have an unusable pair of knitting needles because there are half finished elbow joints stuck on the ends.

I’ve also officially put blood (gave myself a paper cut on sandpaper), sweat (it’s hot where I live), and tears (got sanding dust in my eye) into this project.

I also figured out what character I’m gonna turn the doll into. I’m thinking nikola orsinov from the magnus archives. I know she’s a mannequin but dolls aren’t too much of a stretch and are still firmly in Stranger territory.

[eldritchseaslug]

they’re done!

they still look a bit funky but proper lighting helped a lot I think.

Very proud of this jacket, even though it’s probably destroyed my fingertips permanently.

These are all of the clothes I made:

This is some casual outfits

These are work clothes

And these are their actual canon clothes

I’m not a photographer by any means, and there’s a lot of things about these two that I’m not thrilled about but I’m not unhappy about them either. They’re some of my first customs, it makes sense that they look a bit off. Glad I finished in time for pride month, though. Might do a few more updates if I ever make them new clothes or accessories.

The creature got very curious

[eldritchseaslug]

finishing the gays in time for pride month! The angle and lighting are both horrid here but I hopefully will be able to get some better photos outside. This isn’t everything, I have made three outfits for each of them along with some half-finished accessories (painting set for Darren, tool kit for cicada, etc) the heads I ordered were in 1/6th scale and the bodies were advertised as 1/6th as well but they ended up being closer to 1/7th so they head are a bit too large for the bodies and it looks a bit odd but the heads were unfortunately made of ABS so I couldn’t shrink them without melting them. There are a lot of things I’m unhappy with but I’ve made peace with them because these are my fisrt customs and I’ve already made better ones

[eldritchseaslug]

i imagine that Montparnasse refuses to learn how to braid his own hair because he’s afraid Jehan won’t do it anymore if he does (he’s wrong)

[eldritchseaslug]

i have no idea what montparnasse looks like. this is just vibes mostly. don’t look at the hands too closely they aren’t my finest work