Here we go again/Drossel Lite

So here we go again with the third of the 5 supposed K-ON! Figmas. Like Mio, this one'll take up my end of the week evenings...man, I'm gonna be so tired after all of this...


Besides that bit of news, I've done something new with one of my Drossels, nothing really original, this modification's seen almost everywhere by now. The thing about this was it was impromptu. I didn't even think about this after work today, and after looking through dannychoo.com at some entries, I realized how easy and simple this is to do! I also went a different route than just starting with raw materials.
Drossel...
Drossel Lite!! Same great robot for half the....something (Eh What?)

Image taken with minimal lights in my room...

And now with no lights on.

Since I'm not that good with electrical stuff, it would've been much more difficult to do this with the raw mats. So what I did was picked up a cheap mini LED light, those small reading lights and just took it apart. Total budget for this was $1.39. Not being good with electrical stuff, but good at deconstructing and reusing, I made the backpack out of the light's battery casing. And duct taped all around it to secure the batteries (small watch batteries used BTW).

Made a strap to secure it around her chest. One flaw I made was that the pack now blocks the peg hole for her stand, so I had to dedicate one of the grips from my di:stage's for her. Eh, since I have a bunch; It's not like I'm going to use all the grips at the same time...

A look at the wiring connecting to the LED inside her head. There's a big enough space behind the neck peg that allows for a small LED to be placed in. So, if anyone else is daring to try doing this also, there is no worrying about permanently "scar"ing their Drossel Figma in any way!

I was originally planning doing this with a red LED, but since I'm quite inexperienced in this, it was better to currently go with what was available. Maybe later on I'll make more packs with different lights.

Well that's that. Enjoy and see you next entry!

Weekly update.

There really hasn't been much to update for this week. As for the K-ON! figma situation, my results on that was rather satisfactory. I'll leave it at that. As for the comic I mentioned in the previous post: well, a bit of business and laziness kicked in and I wasn't able to set up the shoot. So I'll go with one of my already planned one for this week and I'll be sure to set up the mentioned one up for next week.Looks like one of the Nendoroid Drossels in the second panel is legless!! It was actually that the left leg was up, as if she's walking, and the right leg was on the ground, just covered up in the view by one of her...."ears". I only noticed after starting to put up the captions ><.

K, see ya next post!

K-ON! Figma!!!

Do you love K-ON!? Yes!!!!
Do you collect figmas? Yes!!!!
Have you preordered your K-ON! Figmas yet? ....................................

I swear, I knew it was going to be hard getting my hands on this one.....I was caught off guard when Yui came up on the sites and to find out that Mio is next, I've been keeping tabs on the sites like a hawk! I'd talk about my luck on this, but I don't want to jinx myself here...
Also, in lieu of this whole figma fiasco, which is messing w/ my weekday evenings lately, I thought up an idea for the next comic related to this. Expect to see it next week!

Weekly Comic #5

Ok, I felt this weekend was going pretty well and it could've ended on a veery good note once I saw a specific email that came in, but it wasn't what I expected and I was like WDH!. I really don't want to talk about it anymore so I'll continue with this week's comic.This one was fun to do. I had to pull in one of my other Yoko figures for the feel in the 2nd panel. I still suck at sound effect text though lol.

Unexpected

I wasn't planning to post anything today, but decided to do so to show off my latest thing.

So, with my latest re-obsession with origami, I came across a small strip of paper, just short of 1/2" wide and thought 'I wonder if I can make a crane off a square of this...'. About an accumulated 30 mins working on this and look what came out of it:

Dude that is freaking small!! And I didn't use any other tools besides an x-acto knife to trim the extra part of the strip to make it square. yeah it's a bit crumply; I haven't mastered making cranes with crisp folds yet (especially one this small -_-). To put it's size into perspective besides the shown quarter for scale, each square on the pad is 1" x 1". This is the smallest I've ever done any origami creation and I don't think I can go any smaller than this. Although it would be very challenging.

Origami

I came across this book while just browsing around in Borders. I thought 'it should be simple. why is there a book on this?'. Little to my knowledge that there was more to it than just the simple crane. If one's good and patient (I guess) as many as 100 cranes can all be interconnected from just one (large) sheet of paper. I was amazed by it. It even gets around to the history and how to make the Senbazuru (1000 Cranes tied to strings to wish someone happiness or recovery from illness/injury). I'd like to attempt to do that one. Simple but tedious ^^.

Here's the book plus a few I've already done. each of these were done off of one sheet of paper.

This one was challenging but I was amazed that I got it down on the first try! The four cranes were all created from one sheet and they are interconnected at each wing tip and the beaks.

So, figuring out how to make chains of cranes wasn't to difficult, and I already did one chain with 6 cranes on it on a post it. I thought, if I had a big enough sheet, I can make a long chain! So that's what's going on in this one. I'm pacing myself, trying to be careful not to tear at their connections. As of right now, I have 7 completed of the potential 40 crane chain! I'll see how far I can get before I make a big mistake and cut it short. I'll keep an update on this and hopefully we'll see a full 40 crane chain at the end! Wish me luck!!

Weekly Comic No. 4

K, one more post before I head off to bed. I think I am able to come up with weekly scenarios for 4 panel comics, so I'd like to start putting up my comics weekly. Here's no. 4:

A Trip to the Zoo

Well, the San Diego Wild Animal Park to be more specific. Took my camera along and took some pictures to experiment some of the settings. I used Manual settings for all my pictures and, honestly, most of the shots were not superb (the ones below were just about 5%-10% of all the pictures I took).... all part of the learning process though. The ones below look like the good ones I took that were worth showing.

There's a hint of the glare from the glass -_-

The story is that the baby Zebra here was born on New Years day. so it's only 10 days old!



And this last shot is if one of my Nendoroid's I brought along for travel shooting. I have some figures separate from my main collection for reason's like this (Figma Haruhi and Konata, Nendoroid's Miku-Kagami and Mio). I don't bring all at the same time, usually just 1-2 just in case the opportunity would come up that I can do a quick shoot with them reacting to their environment. This was my first public figure shooting (even though it was near closing and there wasn't a lot of people around to wonder what the hell I was doing. I can't figure yet how to break that embarrassment barrier yet...).

Finding inspiration...

Sometimes it's easy finding good photoshoot ideas, sometimes it's hard finding the right inspiration. Take yesterday's post. I had like 3 good ideas and I already did what I wanted to do with them and now I'd like to find some new ones. Ah, well, it'll come to me when the time's right.

I created this photoshoot with Miyuki after one of the strips from Lucky Star. Everything looks perfect: The scared look on her face, one of the Gurren Lagann's drills pointed right at her, and even the focused under-lighting gives off a nice feel to the picture, I think anyways. Enjoy!!

4 Panel Comic Strips

Ah, yesterday I had a good run of ideas for 4 panel comic strips. It took me a lot longer than I thought it would, but I feel it's worth the work ^^. And today I was messing around trying to find a suitable program to lay these out; I think the outcome is very satisfactory! (it's probably not entirely the best out there, but with what I got it's still looks pretty good!). I hope to come up with more ideas for comics which I can dish out that are somewhat unique than other ones that are out there already... In short-I had fun doing this and hope to create more further down the line!

Now w/o further delay, here are 3 comics that are products of my sweat, tears (well not really), and me being up late at night during a weekday when I really shouldn't be... (click on the images to see the strips. it looks too small to try and read them from this page).

#1: Fun Fact Notes: This one's a bit on the Ecchi side. It was originally was just going to be Airi and Nanael, but Alleyne just got shipped in and decided to add her in the strip. ^^

#2: Fun Fact Notes: What's a good sound effect for whiffing with a bat?

#3: Fun Fact Notes: I was able to finally use one of the Star Wars mini-helmets I got from Comicon '08 in a photoshoot! (yay!). I like the sound effect text I added in the 3rd and 4th panels.





















edit: looking @ the pictures once I posted them up, their sizes are a bit smaller than I thought. Well this is a trial and error/lesson learned type of thing so.... when I get around to it I'll think about getting these ones in the expected size. I haven't decided yet..