Saturday, February 14, 2009

This (Last) Weekend(day)'s Project: Meltina (Mystina)

About those buttons I mentioned last time...

I was working on a Mystina outfit for Miranda. Despite her not having the right hair color or me having the right shade of light purple (or "Light urple" for you Celebrity jeopardy fans), I went for it. Who's this Mystina character you speak of and why is she also called "Meltina", you ask.

Valkyrie Profile, Tri-Ace, 1999. Perhaps now one of the most interesting cases of "supply and demand" for a video game. No demand when it came out, and therefore not a lot of supply now when the demand rose. This game was notable for the amount of voice acting and cut scenes, and notorious for even the tiniest of scratches on the CD rendering the game worthless. Sealed copies can be swindled for $130 at your local gaming pawn shop, while the re-release can be had for a modest $30 or so.

Anyways, Mystina is one of the mages you can recruit in the game. Meltina is her Japanese name, which sounds really weird regardless of which language you're native to. Sounds like she has something to do with converting solid states of mass to a liquid form. My search for a blue mage costume went sour after flipping through several Magic: the Gathering card visual spoilers, and I decided to mess with this fabric I picked up cheap. No idea what it is, but it's silky, uncontrollable, and a pain to stencil patterns onto without it rolling/stretching out.

Yep. Brunette and with maroon shirt. It actually looks like the colors her in-game sprite has in the Playstation version in combat. I'm not going to go for full accuracy, since I have no idea how to make the frilly doily looking things on her sleeves and collar. Best I can do is this quasi-silk shirt thing. Might as well now highlight the main purpose of the previous post: the irregular buttons.
Blue triangular buttons. I didn't want to cheapen her costume with velcro, because that's the way of dollar bin costuming (Yes, I used Velcro for the TF2 characters, but I went for in-game appearance than functionality. They don't seem to have any visible means of fastening their clothes together.). It would diminish her uniqueness more, as she's not a unique head sculpt by any means, and velcro would make her clothing reminiscent of Barbie and the rest of the sluttier knock-offs that have surfaced.

There's not a lot I can do with her costume, aside from give her something that doesn't scream "slut dressed in vinyl with an uzi". Her lack of willing-dismemberment forces me to actually start manufacturing buttons and such to overcome the barrier of using velcro to secure everything. You can't tell due to her shirt covering it up, but she's using the belt buckle technique I used on the Kris Mage.

I'll have to get around to making boots for her and "completing" her outfit fully. Problem is that I have no idea how to make decent small boots...yet.

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