Momentary lapse

Sorry I've been gone for so long, but my father's recovery from his heart surgery took longer than expected!  He's still obviously recovering, but he's home now so it's so much easier than having to go to the hospital every day!

Now that I'm back I'm working on another little Homestuck Obitsu, since I ordered two more from theJunkySpot.com

I'm going to be making a character called Davesprite (he'll come up under google if you want to look), who's got orange skin this time.  So that means I have to change the whole body color of this doll first!  Or, well, half of it.  He has a 'tail' kind of thing instead of legs, so I separated the body at the hip.  At first I was worried that I was going to have to break something to get it apart, but Obitsus are surprisingly easy to take apart!

All I had to do was pop the little balls on the top of the thighs off with some pliers, and the hips popped right off after!  Since there's such a nice arrangement inside with the joints, it will be perfect to attach elastic to for the tail!  Some kind of armature would be ideal for the tail so it could hold poses better, but I think strung elastic will work just fine.

Now I also have a random pair of hips and legs for... something else?

Next I took all the pieces that I could apart!  I could have taken the stomach piece off too, and probably will before airbrushing, but didn't for the photo.  I had to make sure to remove ALL of the joint pieces, since they're what I'm working on right now.

So here they all are!  Very small, but a huge nuisance.  Since any kind of surface paint that I put on kept chipping off, no matter how many layers or what type of sealant I used, the only other option I could think of was to dye them.  I decided to just go for it since if they didn't turn out well I would have to go back to finding a different surface treatment to cover them, and it would cover up a bad dye job if need be.

I didn't think of it until I had already tried it, but these joints actually come apart into two pieces if you're handy with two pairs of pliers.  I should have done this first since for some reason that I can't fathom they made each side out of a different type of vinyl, so each half takes the dye differently from the other.  What this meant is that one half took dye much quicker than the other.

It wasn't a difficult fix though, I just took them apart after, put the lighter pieces back in the dye bath and then put them back together.  They're not perfect, the dye went on slightly uneven (I used RIT fabric dye, but it was the powdered version and I had trouble getting the crystals entirely dissolved) but since they will be mostly hidden inside the joints I'm not that concerned.

The point is that dyeing the joints actually WORKED!  I'm so pumped, this means that I won't have to edit out huge white splotches in photos where there's chipping in the joints.  The rest of the body I can airbrush since there shouldn't be an issue with rubbing.