Wednesday, June 12, 2013

SOON

It's now Wednesday night/Thursday morning.

Imminent deadlines cause me to go nocturnal, for some reason. This is sometimes a good thing.

On Tuesday, I painted the armour. And then tonight, I painted the armour.

Tuesday was working with an airbrush, which meant that I got all of the armour done - probably the most constructive day I've had in relation to this whole project in a long while. And just now I've drybrushed on some silver to the edges of the pieces so the things look like they've been made outta metal.


Guess which genius lost the nice camera?


And it's 1 AM and I'm sitting here, sipping mulled wine and listening to Anberlin. If I didn't have so many deadlines, this would be a rather nice place to be.

Where to begin?

Okay, there's the paint. This afternoon I also did a spotlight run.

Can I just talk for a moment about how much I detest spotlight? I mean, it's a good place to go find stuff, and your odds of finding stuff to sew with are reasonable, but for me to go there is like for an electrical engineer to source parts for a build from Dick Smith.

Once upon a time, Spotlight would have been a good place to go buy everything. For the most part now though, they stock stuff for quilts, craft, making-your-own-formal-dress and little else.

Fortunately, I just had to buy velcro. So the armour can stick when I put it on. I forgot the glue that I'll need for the wetsuit, which means I have to go back tomorrow TT.TT

Yeah. The wetsuit, which I cannot remember if I mentioned earlier, is the suit that I'm building the armour off. I like the visual texture of neoprene and how it kind of looks like it could work as a real-life interpretation. I mean, the other options I had were standard/close cut clothing (too baggy) or a morph suit (not substantial enough).
So I was really always going to be using neoprene. If I could have built it from scratch, and cost wasn't an issue, I'd have used something much thinner, but hey. I have a steamer that's two sizes too small and that's what I'm using. I'm cutting panels into the suit to compensate for the small size and will cover them with mesh to avoid heatstroke and the dozen other things that can happen when you wear a long wetsuit for too long on a hot day.

I kind of wish I had a camelbak to fit into the thing. That would make the carrying of drinkable water easier. Anyway.

What's left?

I have to finish the paper side of things for Directed Studies - there's bits like techniques and artists I looked at and things I went to that I didn't mention in the blog, and they all need to be written out.

The wetsuit has to be vented, detailed and finished.

The armour needs some finishing things done to it - small details and sealing. Sticking the velcro in. I showed Dad the helm tonight over Skype and suddenly he's pretty keen to help me put some LEDs in it. Which is exciting and nice. That happens this weekend.

I need to go back and find all the bits for the Hollow so they can get presented on the 18th, which is assessment date.

And photos.

I chucked this up on facebook the other day, but it's worth sharing here because there are people who read the blog who don't have me on facebook.

Bec and I headed out to the industrial area behind Cardiff on Monday arvo, in search of a slightly urbanised yet desolated area that would be good for location photography. We've gone out to this area before - Bec's shot a video installation out there, and it's where we took photos of a storm a few months back. It's the kind of area that attracts hoons, something which the scattered rubbish and patina of black elevens on the bitumen can attest to. So we weren't really surprised to see a police car parked next to some purple souped-up thing about 800m from where we were.

I think the place was originally planned as housing, or maybe more industrial zoning, but there's nothing there but sealed roads. It's not uncommon to see L-platers around the area either. But yeah. The other cars were like the next street over but because there's no buildings, we still had line of sight.

I took some photos with my phone, for looking at later and assessing viability.





And then about fifteen minutes later, the police car ambled up next to my vehicle.

It's funny how even when you haven't been doing anything wrong, and you know you haven't been doing anything wrong, that a policeman with two giant German shepherds in the back of his car can make you feel a little nervous.

Anyway. He was headed over, and I could see him heading over - I was near the car, and in a position where 'can't walk off, he's seen me. Can't get in car, he's seen me.'. So I stuck my hands in my pockets awkwardly and waited.

The next five minutes was probably the most amusing I've had trying to explain some facet of cosplay to someone not familiar with it.

He asked what I was doing.

"Oh, just looking for a place to take photos of a costume,"

"What kind of costume?"

I paused. This was the easiest and hardest part to explain.

"Halo armour?"

It got a laugh. Thankfully, it seemed that the man knew about the video game.
Once he understood that I was looking for a place that would make for a good backdrop, he seemed satisfied, and went to go talk to another soupy-looking car that was parked a way down the road. The dogs barked madly as he left.

I guess I could understand the interest. It wasn't until later I realised that the dogs might have been for the smelling out of harmful substances, and from a bystanders view, we were a couple of girls who drove somewhere, hopped out and started looking at the ground and taking photos of it. I think there's a fenced-off mining area nearby too, so yeah. That was Monday's adventure.

I think maybe there's one more blog post I could try for before assessment date. It'll be a retrospective.

I may or may not have just entered the costume in the Cosplay prejudging competition at Supanova. Hopefully it'll go well. We'll have to see.

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