#ratralsis figures

[ratralsis]

The thing about being an adult is that sometimes you get a weird idea and nobody can stop you from following through on it.

I learned recently about wooden peg dolls. You can google them if you want to, but basically people would make dolls out of, well, wooden pegs. A head, a body, and then four limbs that could all move and even bend in the middle, so two pegs for each limb so that the doll would have elbows and knees.

And there's a little wooden doll in the book I'm writing, so I decided that I would make it a wooden peg doll specifically.

Then I wondered how hard it would be to make one myself.

So today I bought supplies at my local Michael's.

The wood wasn't expensive, but the saw, carving knives, and spray paint kinda were. At least I have them now, is what I tell myself.

And then I built a doll.

It's just an unfinished wooden doll body, with the head and body as a single piece, and I drilled two holes through it and slid 3/16" dowel rods through those holes. Then I drilled holes into 1/2" dowel rods that I cut to make the arms and legs, and glued wooden beads onto the ends to cap them off. So they should stay in place, and the arms and legs can spin. No elbows or knees, but that's okay. This was a first attempt, made in my basement where I keep all kinds of other weird random stuff.

Next time, I'll try using the carving knives I bought to scoop out space in the arms and legs for the beads and flatten those beads out into something closer to a disc, so that they sit more flush with the limb instead of giving it those bulky shoulder and hip buttons. That'll be tough. I don't have a power saw, just the hand saw, knives, and sandpaper.

Not sure yet how I'll do the elbows and knees on any future dolls, if I'll ever do them at all. But the point is that I decided I wanted to try making a little wooden doll, and I did it.

Don't let your dumb ideas just sit in your head. Turn them into dumb and expensive projects that look like junk.

[ratralsis]

April 29:

Because the putty is white and the rest of the figure is gray, it's difficult to tell if I've gotten things lined up correctly sometimes. My solution is to hold Marigold up to a light like this and use her silhouette as a guide. In these images, I'm proving to myself that I've added enough putty and can get to smoothing her down.

Her right middle arm, the biggest trouble spot, looks pretty good.

Her legs shouldn't need any additional putty. Her left leg has been smoothed down some and is getting there. Her right leg just got some more putty and is still wet, but shouldn't need any more.

Her horns look great!

[ratralsis]

April 28:

I hit her with three layers of brushed-on putty on her leg seams, and at least one everywhere else but her neck. Her neck appears to have enough glue squeezed out that it shouldn't need any putty, but I'll find out for sure when I prime her. Tomorrow, I plan on doing a fourth layer, and then using the knife, files, and some ultra-fine sandpaper to try to smooth out the seams on her arms a little bit and get her legs to be perfectly smooth across the gap. Once she's painted, I don't want it to look like those legs were ever separate from her hips.

I didn't wait long enough before doing the first layer, and there were still some water droplets left in her leg seams, leading to that extremely thin layer of watered-down putty on her epigynum. I cleaned it up enough that it's just discolored now and not raised at all, but I'm still unhappy about it.

She has breasts, but no navel or vagina. Spider demons don't give live birth, though Creature Caster later pivoted on this and decided that their demons do. I suggested to the admin I've been emailing back and forth with that this suggests spider demons lay eggs but still nurse their young, and he agreed that he liked the idea of them hatching into mammal-like creatures. So that's canon, as far as I'm concerned, folks. That's fucking canon.

What isn't canon is whether or not she'd be capable of interbreeding with a human. I'm going to go with "obviously not." The parts wouldn't... fit. I mean, I guess she can do other stuff, though. Pretty much ANY other stuff, right?

I'm not gonna write more about that. I prefer to think about how she's capable of giving warm, gentle hugs with three pairs of arms at once! I, for one, would love to hug her! It sounds very nice! She's a nice girl, really!

And by "girl," I mean she's twenty-three! So it's not illegal that she's nude!

[ratralsis]

April 28:

Marigold is now fully assembled and awaits additional plastic putty to fill her twelve seams: one where each of her eight limbs plus her head connect to her torso, plus one more on three of her arms. She is not glued into that base, and probably never will be. I do eventually want to add some fake moss or grass to it to kind of fluff it up and make her talons look like they're gripping it more securely.

I'm proudest of the points on her four horns. They're a little rough, but I've decided not to let "perfect" be the enemy of "good." Or, to put it another way: "finished, not perfect."

I'm optimistic that any flaws or rough spots I introduced to her middle right arm with its long rows of painted putty will make her more visually interesting and not less so.

I've spent sixteen days getting her to this point. For comparison, Katia took me seventeen days TOTAL, from start to finish. Tifa took me thirty-five, and I'm guessing Marigold will be about the same. Painting her will be far, far less tricky than painting Tifa, though Marigold will require a lot more detail work. It's going to be long, difficult, miserable work, but it'll be worth it if she ends up half as pretty in real life as she is in my head.

[ratralsis]

April 27:

There's a little bit of cleanup left to do on the bottom arms, so this may have been premature, but all six arms are now glued into Marigold's torso.

Fun fact: Marigold has loved music since childhood, and can play piano, violin (or fiddle, depending on the type of song she's playing), and lute. The extra four arms, lacking fingers, are completely unhelpful with all three instruments. Think about it.

[ratralsis]

April 26:

I primed the frog!

[ratralsis]

April 26:

I can get the feet pretty solidly on the base, though they aren't, like, PERFECTLY lined up perfect. That's an issue with the pieces themselves, and not my own skill. I love how her right talons (I feel weird calling them "toes") wrap around the top part of that rock like she's a fucking gargoyle, though. I just really find that kind of detail fascinating.

In theory, I could heat up the resin of the foot and bend it so that it would fit more securely. I do not trust myself to use either a hair dryer or boiling water to do that, though. I can fix most things, but melting is not on the list.

The legs have very long pegs that go into the holes in the figure's hips, so I'm not worried about them being anything other than perfectly secure and solid once glued in. The very low overall quality of the build means that there are gigantic gaps in the thighs, though. The right thigh has a gap as thick as one of her fingers. This is fillable with some more plastic putty. It will probably take me a couple of days to build it up, though. I'm not looking forward to it, but it will work, and be strong, once finished.

Today, though, is still all about smoothing and fixing the moldlines and seams on her legs and three remaining arms before gluing them in. I want to glue the legs on last. I'm just kind of testing the fit and so on right now.

I might try adding some grass or other little things to the base once it's painted to kind of fluff it up and make it look like her right foot is on there more tightly than this. Or I might not. Make it look like those talons are kind of dangling instead of firmly grasping the rock.

If Creature Caster ever makes a new mold for this figure, or starts selling the STL files so that people can 3D print their own instead of making resin casts, I'd love to try making her a second time. This resin version is a fucking disgrace. I'm on track to spend more time fixing, repairing, and tweaking this figure than on the entirety of some other ones.

[ratralsis]

April 25:

After a third layer of apoxie sculpt, the ponytail is now a good enough size that I'm done adding to it. Tomorrow evening (I'm going to give it a good 30 hours to cure, since it's shiny from added water in these photos because that was the only way I could get my sculpting tools to not stick to it) I'll file and carve it into a nice style. That added piece sticking off the back, especially, I'll have to be very careful about filing into what will essentially be a fragile little shard of rock.

It will certainly be much more difficult to paint her spinal column with this, but damn it, I really would have never forgiven myself if I hadn't tried as hard as I could to give her the long, flowing black hair that Marigold originally had. This is long enough and full enough that you can imagine her untying it and letting that mane fall down to her shoulderblades.

I've also been sharpening and cleaning her horns as I go, and they're about right, too.

With all the additional putty, knife, and file work that I'm not showing, I hope to have her fully assembled and glued together by Wednesday. Then I'll start painting her, and boy howdy, that's when I'll REALLY start fucking her up.