This Weekend's Project: Gauntlets

At last, my last batch of free Magic: the Gathering packs came in the mail. I've gotten a few packs previously with their promotion, and to my dismay, I've yet to see what the contents of a green colored pack was. Seven boxes later, still no green pack.

Not a single green pack. 5 black, 4 blue, 3 red and 2 white packs total. Wizards knows what colors I play, evidently, just by my mailing location. With that out of the way, this weekend was dedicated to doing nothing. After that was done (or, rather, not done in this case), I proceeded to make gauntlets.

I have no idea how to do gloves at 1:6 scale, especially individually articulated fingers. Not to mention, ARMORED fingers. I'll figure that out soon, hopefully. Until that time, I can get the lower arm portions done. Aelia's armor is asymmetrical for the arms, which makes the joy of pattern making useless. Although, that's also a good thing, due to the added complexity of the left arm compared to the right arm...


...because the left arm looks like this. The left arm has a dragon head "protecting" the hand, which seems to limit a lot of the movement instead. The art did not show any indication of moving components to suggest a flexible assembly.


This piece involved a lot of Dremel use to shape the details. Glad I didn't attempt this when I was using crude methods of sandpaper taped around an X-Acto knife handle. There's some whiskers I need to find better materials for, but in the meantime, thin 110lb cardstock strips curled a bit will do.

So far, Aelia's near completion. What's left is skirt plating attachment, gloves, and mostly fasteners. I'm still looking for a good satin ribbon to use to make the belt fasteners, but unfortunately, I don't have the colors I would like.

On a side note, I corrected Aelia's head last week due to her head having a severe case of "made poorly by apathy". Her right eye was 0.055 inches higher than desired, giving her a really bad case of Shunya Yamashita's "beaten on the back of the head with a lead pipe" syndrome. Shunya Yamashita did part of the art for Valkyrie Profile: Silmeria, the sequel to Valkyrie Profile: Lenneth, which Aelia is from. Aside from even more ridiculous armor, Yamashita tends to have the problem of drawing all girls with the same face shape, age, and blank stare like they've been beaten over the head a minute beforehand. The art for VP:Silmeria was rendered useless for armormaking purposes due to the bad idea of "Hey! Let's add high heels to EVERY girl in the game regardless of functionality!"

From an engineering standpoint, I can't enjoy impractical armor anymore. Simply because I'm the one who has to figure out how to make it work if I try to replicate it, and it's going to look really bad when I try to make it.