EBASENET - It's all about modeling

SD DOM / For FFF SD Competition

Posted by Whitebase : 25th November 2007, 2:00 am

I originally tried to make the transparent visor part by doing heat forming, but that didn’t turn out well. As a result, I had to go for a simpler approach. I had a ‘blister pack’ in the shape I wanted, so the visor was cut out from there..

Here’s a test fit of the visor

In the anime, the Doms are very fast mobile suits and hover about and slide around corners as though they are roller-blading. I wanted to capture this movement in this kit. Here’s a test fit of how the pose would be. The upper torso and the waist portion are temporarily secured with blu tack here.

I tried out the cast iron technique on this kit at on the chest, waist and also feet. This was done by first masking out the area intended for the cast iron effect. Then I dabbed diluted putty onto the surface with a hard brush. Shown here is how it looks like with the masking removed.

While working on this kit, I somehow had an idea to show a comparison in speed. I don’t know where the idea came from, but I decided to show it by having the Dom slide around a slow moving snail. Shown here is a test fit with the snail. I simulated the smoke trails using crumpled tissue paper.

The original concept has a “?” appearing from the Dom as well, but after looking at the entire piece, it seemed too busy so I dropped it, and stuck with having just the “!” from the snail.

The base was a disk made out of plaster of paris which is bought for a few bucks. I used real soil from the garden, mixed with white glue and literally applied the mixture onto the base. While the surface of the mixture was still moist, I sprinkled more sand onto the surface, and gently knocked and tapped the lose soil off. The grass was added on the same way.

Unfortunately, I don’t have any more pics on the weathering or the smoke trails. Weathering was done using chalk pastels or various shades, grounded into a powder, mixed with Tamiya X20A thinner and applied onto the model. The smoke trails were made with cotton, and ‘dirtied’ with the same chalk pastels. Here’s how it looks like about 80% complete.