Alrighty, let’s build an arm!

As before, the first step was to lay down bulk. Ectros armour is fairly minimal around the upper arm, but with GIGANTIC gauntlets around the forearm.

I marked where the shoulder and upper arm muscles would be, and then started applying the lowest layers of the forearm plating.

Then, a crapton more clay was added to create the bulk of the gauntlet.

If you have a good eye for anatomy, you should finally be able to spot the problem I mentioned earlier with her arm length– her hand hangs about 0.5mm too low underneath the gauntlet, and the gauntlet itself hangs about 1mm too far below the elbow. These may sound like trivial measurements, but when the entire model is only 35mm tall to begin with, 1.5mm difference ends up being quite a large screw-up. 🙁

Sadly there wasn’t much I could do about it at this point without nuking hours of work and possibly damaging the leg. I would have done so if this was a scratch sculpt, but given that it was “only a conversion”, I simply grumbled and made my peace with it. :/

Getting the right shape for the bracer was quite complicated, as those indented notches needed to be cut in at fairly precise angles and depths. It took me several hours of nitpicking with various Clayshapers to get everything to look even remotely correct.

Once that was done, though, the arm started to fall together. Another “ring knob thing” was added on the back of the forearm, and I started laying down mass for the elbow which, unlike the knee, wouldn’t actually be an armour plate– instead, the elbow is where a big “ammo belt” thing connects to the model’s arm from the backpack. For now, I just made it into a rectangle.

Next I moved onto the shoulder pad, which would sit over the majority of Neema’s upper arm.

The shoulder plate is another area where Neema’s armour diverges from the male Ectros design, being proportionally smaller to help her avoid looking like a Football player. Personally that was the exact look I was going for, however, so I opted to scale mine back up to full size. In addition to making her look more formidable, this went some way toward helping to cover up the problems with her arm scaling, which is nice.

Now, a random aside: this is the point in the project where I built the video recording rig I talked about last month, and recorded myself working for a while to see how the lighting, zoom, and so on turned out. So if that sounds like something you might enjoy, here is forty minutes of me very slightly reshaping a shoulder pad:

Riveting, I know. 😛

As is my way, I moved away from the arm when it reached approximately the 80% completion mark to work on the chest armour for a while. I planned to completely rebuild it from scratch, so Step 1 was to hop off her stupid metal bikini with a pair of hobby clippers. Then, I laid down a blob of Green Stuff to help adhere the soon-to-follow layers of clay to the metal model, just as we did before around the wires.

The chest armour itself was quite easy to build– a wad of clay smushed flat across her ribcage, with a step pressed into it to differentiate the plate just above her abs.

These basic shapes were worked for a while with Clayshapers to define their edges and angles.

It’s hard to see here, but I also added some clay in the trench between her chest plate and her gorget, which was given Symbiote grooves like I’d done on the arms and legs.

More work with Clayshapers, and Neema finally had some sensible goddamned clothes on for a fight. 😛

Back to the shoulder! More cleaning up of the silhouette and sharpening of edges, and then I applied two small clay snakes, flattened them, and firmed their edges to form the rectangular knobby bits that adorn most Tohaa shoulder pads.

At this point I was running out of things to add, so I went back over the concept art and my other Ectros model to look for other differences in their armour. This was when I realized that she was entirely missing the butt-obscuring plates that CB generously sculpted onto the male Ectros to spare their Many Audience of Manly Men from having to gaze at highly-distracting Manbutts.

Well, if Boy Ectros gets butt protection, then so does Girl Ectros.

Sorry everyone. Where ever will you turn now for perky ladybutts?

Oh, right.

*sigh*

So, at this point I thought I was finished, and I started walking over to the oven to bake the model, and realized halfway there that Neema only had one shoe. Which, obviously, isn’t the most practical way to move around a battlefield. So I sat back down and whipped her up a left shoe to match the right one.

Green stuff, then clay, then basic shapes with metal tools, then Clayshapers, etc etc etc.

You know the drill by now.

Aaaaaaaaaaand shoes.

Another thing I almost forgot: the structural wire for her “arm ammo belt” thing. I wouldn’t be able to detail it right now, but wanted to sink the wire into place so that her first baking would fix it solidly into place and give me a rigid support to push against when building the belt.

Like so!

Three hours of very slow, methodical cleanup and sharpening (which I could have easily dragged out to three days– seriously, cleanup is NEVER FINISHED) later, I decided that she was “good enough” and baked everything.

This is always the most heart-wrenching part of the sculpting process, because if you missed a mistake, it’s now officially too late to go back and fix it. ;_;

Once everything was solid, I laid green stuff and clay over the wire, and used a clayshaper to make it into a roughly flat band. I was worried about accidentally making it too fat, but as luck would have it, the original sculptor made his almost exactly as fat as I did. It’s nice to have periodic reminders sometimes that professional sculptors have to obey the same physical constraints that I do. 🙂

The flat band was segmented using a knife…

…and then a small notch was pushed up on the bottom of each segment.

A dot was added to either side of each segment, and then everything was cleaned up with Clayshapers.

Once again I worried that my belt looked squishy and low-detail, and again I was reassured by looking to the original and seeing that it was the same. 🙂

And with that, Neema was… done. 🙂

Quick thing to note here: see the dark space between the beige Fimo and the white metal? That’s where the clay contracted during baking. It’s a fairly minor reduction in size, but it was enough to create a very visible gap between the leg and the crotch, which required patching with Green Stuff all the way around.

And that‘s why I usually do conversions in Green Stuff. 🙁

After the sculpting was finished, I put Neema aside for about a month to work on a terrain project. However, last week I finally had some time again, and at long last sat down to power her through to completion.

I decided to take my time with Neema to get all of her blending and detailing as clean as I possibly could. She took over twice as long as the Ectros (three full days plus a handful of evenings), and it’s safe to say that she probably represents the peak of what I can accomplish with paint.

Which is a bit saddening because even though I’m quite proud of how she turned out, my “peak painting output” apparently isn’t anywhere near where I want it to be. She took a dozen more hours than the first Ectros, all of it spent tediously refining blended gradients and applying careful freehand details, and in the end the two look essentially identical.

With all of that said, though, I guess I can draw one silver lining from all of that gloom: it probably means that I don’t need to put anywhere near that amount of effort into my remaining Tohaa models, as any time I spend beyond “basic application of colours” won’t show up anyway. Which means the army just got a bit faster to paint.

So… yay, I guess?

Oh, and one other thing I finally did: recording the paint swatches I used and the recipes used to create each one. My colours varied a bit during the production of my first four Tohaa models as I played around with different blends, but at this point I have a pretty clear idea of what I want each stage to look like, so I made a point to write all of it down so that I can still replicate it if I decide not to paint for a year.

Which is absolutely something that happens to me sometimes.

I, like, really hate painting, you guys. 😛

Aaaaaanyway. Painful and depressing though it may have been, Neema’s paint is finally complete, and if you will join me on Page 3, we can now behold her in her spiky, tropical-flavoured majesty.