Nothing ventured nothing gained right (is it obvious that this aphorism is slowly becoming one of my favorites)?
Anyway, model building is like zen to me; arduous and repetitive production related tasks like sanding, sculpting, paneling and all that are strangely relaxing to me. In one of my previous builds (my Eva 00 model kit), I've sat through what amounted to around seven or more hours of sanding, washing, and sanding again, just to get those pesky injection molding sprues evened out with the rest of the piece. I don't know, but it's perhaps because I feel some form of detachment and escape from stressful reality when I perform these tasks, like I'm reciting a silent mantra with each pass of sandpaper or stroke of a modelling tool. Anyways, before I get too philosophical about things, let me talk about the project I'm about to feature in this blog post.
About a week or so ago, a friend decided she would cosplay one of her ball-jointed dolls as a Little Sister from Bioshock (great game by the way, if only it weren't so dizzying for the uninitiated). The costume was perfect, she even got her little girl glow in the dark eyes, but it was missing an iconic piece - something a Little Sister wouldn't be caught dead without (and that's not even a metaphor; Little Sisters always carried this malice filled iconic piece which I'm needlessly foreshadowing). Immediately (and maybe a little impulsively) I decided to volunteer and make said iconic piece, which led to today's build.
Let me present to you, the Little Sister Syringe:
IMAGE TAKEN FROM THE UTTERLY AMAZING
VOLPIN PROPS, LINK HERE.
For the build, my friend and I had been tossing around ideas for what material to use. We eventually settled for Sculpey III, partly because it's convenient to use and partly because it was the most readily available at the time of purchase. Again, before I proceed, let me just say, I'm a total newbie when it comes to working with Sculpey, or any extremely pliable material for that matter. Don't expect polish to any degree, maybe in due time I would improve, but due time is not available to me at the moment, along with experience. Not to say I didn't enjoy the build though, had a blast the entire time I was sculpting the piece.
Anyway (what is it with me and blabbering?).
I forgot to document the early stages of the build, but it wasn't really that interesting anyway. We printed a scaled image of the Volpin Props replica above to be in scale my friend's BJD (will be henceforth referred to as Violet), after which I got to conditioning (fancy term for kneading, squishing and more kneading) the Sculpey. Violet has a body that was a little bit more mature than a Little Sister, so I eyeballed and scaled up the piece to fit her proportions relative to the actual syringe in the games. Didn't help that different game arts featured different sized syringes, but we got the size pretty much dialed in.
If there was one interesting thing about the initial stages of the build though, it would be the search for the materials and tools we would use for the build. As you would see in the pictures below, we sort of winged it as we went along. We were fortunate to find an old plastic picture frame of sorts that worked perfectly as a work bench (worked as a work bench... hmmm...). It was cool because we were able to slip the printed scaled picture of the syringe into the frame, which allowed me to eyeball the size and shape of the individual parts of the project. I also had to build some modelling tools on the fly, by bending some wire I found lying around (I think it was from an old binder clip) into a small hoop and attaching it to the handle of an exacto knife (after removing the blade of course). Worked perfectly I must say, for a makeshift tool.
I decided I'd do the main body of the syringe first, modelling it out from a thick wad of Sculpey. I attempted quite a number of different approaches sculpting this part, but I eventually settled with modelling it around a portion of chopstick. Hey, it worked great, I guess the dining philosophers were up to something when they fought over chopsticks!
AND NOBODY GOT THE REFERENCE...
OH WELL, MOVING ON...
That's me by the way, toiling and laboring just to get the shape of the piece right. Afterwards, I got to work creating the tubes sticking out of the main piece, again using Sculpey molded along some unraveled paper clips. In hindsight, I guess I should have searched for some tube pieces instead of molding it out of polymer clay (an extremely difficult task, which I failed quite badly), but I wasn't sure of the proportions at that time, so I just winged it and went with what's available. Next time I'd probably do some more initial planning. Lesson definitely learned.
YES, I WORKED ON A CHAIR.
DEAL WITH IT.
About midway through building the piece, I decided to try curing Sculpey using a blow drier. My friend's brother was having guests on that day, and we didn't want to bother their cooks by using the oven. Needless to say it didn't work, so we bothered the cooks anyway.
DIE PIECE OF POLYMER CLAY!
DIE!
The action-y caption is me over compensating for using a blow drier. For some reason, my friend found that funny. My manliness rating has forever suffered a 10 percent reduction.
Anyways, after building the main piece with the pipes sticking out of it, we decided to cure the clay to see if it would all work out. We were both very anxious at that point because, hey, it was the first time for both of us working with Sculpey clay! Fired the piece at around 250 degrees Fahrenheit for about 20 minutes, worked rather perfectly.
I had to leave for a moment to attend to another business, but once I got back, I had a few minutes to spare to create the needle portion of the syringe, plus the little tube attached to it. I first tried sanding and whittling a chopstick (didn't know chopsticks were so tough to cut into) to create the needle. I couldn't get it to a well defined point, which was when I realized I brought barbecue skewers for the express purpose of creating the needle. About five minutes of wasted effort, but hey, I made my friends laugh at my idiocy, and I learned the real toughness of the ultimate oriental culinary cutlery.
I had to leave for the day, but my friend cured the piece at about 270 to 300 degrees Fahrenheit for about 15 minutes (the oven was already preheated to that temperature, and we were trying to see how much leeway we actually have in terms of curing). Below is the picture of what we were able to finish for Day 1 of the Little Sister Syringe build:
PRETTY COOL FOR A FIRST BUILD, ALTHOUGH
I HAVE TO ADMIT, I NEED MORE PRACTICE
I decided that whatever I couldn't do at the sculpting phase, I'd try to do during the sanding phase. Hopefully I could get the tubes and pieces evened out a bit more, as much as I could. Next up would be building the little trigger mechanism, plus preparing the ADAM vial. I was planning on using a little snap fastener to attach the vial to the main piece, and I'm excited to see how that would turn out. This was so we could attach an assortment of vials to the syringe: a full one, a half full one, an empty one, and maybe some others). Anyways, next time I'd try to take better quality photos, but for now, that would be all.
Whew, trepidation and excitement galore! See you on the next installment!
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