This Weekend's Project: The Magic Gauntlets

There's a reason why no one sells 1:6 scale gloves with individual fingers. The majority of the dolls you will buy will have molded gloves. Why? First, you'll need the prerequisite of individually movable fingers. Again, you may ask why that's necessary. You can't put on gloves if your fingers are non-flexible. Aelia's hands have wire understructure that allow her to have one set of hands that handle all her poses, rather than make her have multiple hand sets like other dolls.

Second, 1:6 scale gloves with individually separate fingers are a pain to make. Perhaps the most expensive part to make if you were to actually make them for a mass produced figure. It's too much sewing for a small part. Luckily, I'm the only guy willing to try making it, since I only have to do it twice.

The gloves were made by sewing four individual tubes around her fingers, then sewing them together to form a glove. It's infeasible to sew them like gloves done at 1:1 scale, since the size prohibits them from being turned inside out to hide the seams. Therefore, the seams are on the outside of the gloves for all five fingers. Aelia's gloves are armored, which gives me the benefit of hiding the seams with armor plating. A bit of Magic and a bit of hot glue allows me to stick the plating onto her gloves. Each finger has separate armor plating segments that also allow her to retain her finger flexibility.

The only problem I've had so far is that her fingers are too short inside her glove finger length. She can do some limited gestures, but lacks the finger tip dexterity to fully grasp items. Still enough to hold a polearm. They are pretty good looking despite their bulk.


Aelia is nearly complete. Just needs some refinements to her waist armor segments and she'll be ready for priming.

This Weekend's Project: Fleshing Out A Skeleton

Well, another week, another update. This week, I've spent a good deal of time inhaling more tasty airborne carcinogens to flesh out Aelia. Right now, she's missing proper feet, her rest of her head, and elbow covers. For the time being, rather than show off her incomplete scalp, I've dug up an antiquated hair model from long ago, and surprisingly, it fits. She has an odd appearance to her face that I need to identify, rectify and execute. I think it's the wide eyes making her look like she's scared of Hotaru and her newly stolen bat.

I actually need to redo the bat. It's quite off in shape and it's covered with red marks for when I was testing the scout's BONK! action button by hitting a dispenser repeatedly.

Aelia's sporting the Shenhua hairdo I made two years ago back when I was attempting to make Shenhua. Back heavy and impractical, it's all I have to offer her until I find a proper transplant donor for hair. I had issues with her head sculpt this week, so I decided to complete her face to see how she looks near complete. A blank head's also undeniably creepy looking, especially one with empty eye sockets.

Rather than make this post completely devoid of content from the farce of a "show and tell" it started off as, here's something useful. Here's the construction progress of the hands. I've actually never properly documented it.

The process uses regular thin electrical wire of some unknown gage with 25mm x 30mm strips of printer paper rolled around them to form the fingers. A 6x6x8mm 4 walled box connects the fingers to the stub. I trimmed the fingers down to a max length of 25mm counting the root, which gives about 20mm of protruding finger to work with. I layered some 110 lb cardstock over certain portions to flesh it out, and carved them down with a Dremel. Cheating, but it yields a nice shape unattainable with just folding and cutting. I may have to update everyone's hands to this newer design.

Figure Comparison: Hotaru versus BBI

Out of pure interest in how Hotaru measures up against other 1:6 scale figures, I bought a somewhat random figure, which by the coat markings lead me to believe it's made by BBI. She arrived about 2 months late, giving me plenty of time to mull over her new name which I instantly decided on impulse when she actually arrived. I've named her Miranda after a thug character in Troika Games' Arcanum: of Steamworks and Magicks Obscura, because her head sculpt has silver eyeliner that reminds me of tears, leading me to the name Miranda Tears in Tarant's "The Boil", the slum area of the city. What a weird way to name a figure, eh? Then again, Hotaru was named after her hair... I could have easily started naming them after popular Japanese Pop icons, but that would make less sense.

Anyways... I set to work comparing her attributes and structure to Hotaru.
The first thing you'll notice is either the nipples, or the difference in height. After you've finished staring at the nipples and other bits, I'll continue with the comparison. Hotaru has limited leg movement, and greater range of motion for the arms. I kept the leg ROM more human-like (you try doing the BBI pose) for Hotaru. I've also noticed that the BBI figure has girthy thighs. Not quite epic Chun-Li levels, but still significantly big.


As for the other details, I've checked for compatibility of my constructed garments with Miranda, and they actually work. I'm quite surprised about that, expecting some bad fits and incompatible clothing forcing me to specially tailor things to one or the other. Some other things you'll notice is the hand difference. Hotaru's hands are much smaller than Miranda's. I'm ok with girls with manly sized hands if it means they can wield bludgeoning tools of death as easily as I can. I can't actually remove her gun grip hands and put on the kung-fu fireball deflection palm hands she comes with, without fear of snapping off the pegs that hold them in place. This is where I appreciate the bendable wire supported hands Hotaru has: they may come out easily, but she can do any hand gesture with one set of hands.

"NYEH NYEH! I'm taller than YOU are!"

Did I mention Miranda's really short? Hotaru has heeled boots right now, adding 9mm of height to her. Hotaru towers over her even without the assistance. I based Hotaru's height based on standard human drawing practices of using the head as a unit of measure. Her torso and arms came out fine, but she got longer legs somehow out of it. I'm not complaining: I rather like the longer legs.

Another thing that I should mention is that Miranda can't hold any dynamic poses involving her back/torso. She cheats on the construction, using spring loaded joints to maintain her form. While stable, she can't do any forward leans and only can do mild back arching. Side movement is more of a wish than a reality.

So far, Miranda has convinced me that I like my constructs better than what BBI can produce. Sculpting is great, but what good is that if it can't hold a fun pose?

Molded Versus Sewn Gloves

One of the most important choices for making the Heavy doll/figure was whether to mold his gloves onto his fists or to sew actual gloves for him. Molding them on is considerably simpler and faster, but sewing gives it a better appearance but takes much longer. I ended up choosing to sew gloves for the heavy, partly to hide his wrist joints. They're less ugly when they're covered by the gloves, and it also helps cover the semi-poor paint job I did.

Using the same method described to make the Heavy's clothes, I layered paper over his fists and created a template for his gloves. Hotaru holds one of two patterns needed to achieve the glove. Note the rectangular hole for the glove back. I planned on making the glove velcro together, since I don't have a good stretchy fabric to do the gloves with. Small issue, but better than nothing. The gloves don't cover all of his hands, which also helped the decision to sew them together. The fingerless glove allows me to take a shortcut and not sew holes for each individual finger. If I had molded his hands better and had better sewing control, I'd consider doing that.

Anyways, now for some shots to celebrate the near completion of the Heavy.


This really makes me notice how thin and pale Hotaru is compared to the Heavy. Not going to change anything though. She'll be filling in the role of the minigun until I get around to that.

This Weekend's Project: Handiwork

Less whining about epoxy, more using the epoxy. Finally got around to working on the hands. Mainly because my sculpey has dried solid. Well, to minimize epoxy volume, I decided to go with the traditional wire armature with aluminum foil approach.

There's the hands over the crude sketches of the wire length dimensions.

Hand after a bit of fleshing out with aluminum foil. I used the epoxy to hold it to the pre-existing hand. Now, to do that, I had to modify the hand a bit, since the fingers were smaller and in the way. Fortunately, there's many devices on my desk that can get the job done...

Scissors are overrated. Jamming things into moving machinery is for MEN!

Here's the current state of the Heavy. Hands are roughly done, waiting for the epoxy to cure before I attempt to add more volume. Loctite works wonders holding the foil down as I add more layers. I'm sure there's a technique for adding foil over wire, but I'm certainly not using it. I'm rolling it over the wire fingers right now, and randomly folding the end over miscellaneous regions. The end result is a few laminations of foil coming off slightly every few places.

Hopefully, this project will reach a nice end.