After reprinting a few missing pieces, I could start to assemble the entire articulated figure I’ve been designing from scratch, and paint the face.

Assembling the prototype is a bit anticlimactic

It’s been great to see so much of my work come together, especially as I’ve been doing all of this for the first time, but even my revised and refined pieces need to be reworked some more. I couldn’t possibly have envisioned it without printing the entire prototype though, and all of the pieces I’ve printed are going to be put to use, even if they’re relegated to another figure.

I just couldn’t be bothered with fitting all of the custom-printed pegs into the joints, seeing as I might be replacing them, so I just used chopped-down bamboo skewers and a bit of blu-tac.

So here’s what needs to be changed:

• The belly’s too big and round. I gave myself too much of a pot!
• The cup joint in the belly is too far back.
• The hip joints need to be repositioned and simplified.
• Several areas of mass need to be reduced to allow for a better range of motion and…
• I want to improve my ball and socket joints to make them stronger and easier to assemble.

Even before I put all of these parts together, I’d already started improving on the form of some of the pieces, so there are already better versions available to use. I just don’t know whether to reprint them all at the current, larger scale, or to make 1:12 figures to match the figures I’ve been using since last year.

That’s why I didn’t reprint the hands and feet – and didn’t bother to pose the figure with the existing hands, because they looked so much more crude than none at all.

I do know that at some point, I need to stop myself from going back and tweaking things, because I’ll never stop.

Painting up my printed heads (as my portrait of the week) was interesting, because I ended up with a portrait that looked uncannily like my mother! Just a blob on the end of an eye turned me into her, and of course, the lack of hair did the trick as well.

We truly do turn into our mothers, even if we’re made of plastic.

Last week

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