#I bought the artbook a while ago

[bunbunsama]

couldn’t help but think about viago with a somniari!rook & how he’d 1000% invest so much time & effort & resources into just understanding what it means because 1. he’s watched her talk to thin air for hours before she realized she wasn’t talking to a person 2. some clients comment on how great a job she did because “not only are they dead but now everyone thinks they were possessed/mentally unhinged!” because “what do you mean you killed the target with a nightmare? what do you mean a spirit helped you???”

viago is committed to figuring out tf Nasi is & when de riva mages figure it out, telling him about how she is a danger to have around because she’s basically always on the cusp of becoming possessed as demons always consume their minds. so he spends years studying magic that he cannot touch, probably gives rook a look when she asks to have her new friend put in contact with viago’s art dealer because “wait do you mean the emmrich volkarin? author to novel intricacies and other machinations of the deeper fade?” & nas’revas is like “how do you know that?”

also it makes me love the regret prison scene even more cause i love a good old lovers reunion but viago being there & descending upon her immediately because he knows how her magic feels, knows how it trembles when she wakes up from going too far, when she’s dig too deep & she can’t tell the difference betwixt what’s real & what’s not & it makes her the prime target for demons to descend.

he knows cause he’s watched it happened when she was younger, how she held herself tight & kept singing through the lightning storm, covering her ears & getting louder so that she couldn’t hear the voices anymore. he knows how to help her through it, gathers her up in his arms & has to push away the mangle of feelings inside him— because he thought she was gone, thought she could be dead or worse, & now she’s here again & he’s so tired & overjoyed & angry at her for even putting herself in that situation, but it has to wait because she needs him.

[umilily]

for the music asks: 17, 23, 28!

17: A song that would sing a duet with on karaoke

i can't think of an actual duet right now, but i have very fond memories of bawling take me to church with my best friend at karaoke, hehe

23: A song that you think everybody should listen to

haikei, natsu ni oboreru by n-buna. it's criminally underrated.

28: A song by an artist with a voice that you love

kando≠reduction by akiakane. i feel like her voice you either love or hate... wish she were still making music.

[eliotbaum]

FAQ

I made an FAQ about Commissions, online store, brushes etc here a while ago! I'll do a more informative pinned post for people who access tumblr only from their dash, so please refer to the FAQ here under the cut.

What program do you use?

I use Adobe Photoshop CC and Procreate. Photoshop for painting and colouring, Procreate for sketching and inks. 

What brushes do you use?

I can’t share most brushes since I bought them ages ago and don’t have the source for them anymore, sorry. For Photoshop, I use flat or rake brushes, and one flat, calligraphy-like one that tilts with pen sensitivity, and an airbrush that has some kind of grainy paintspray effect. For Procreate, I most commonly use Max Ulichney brushes for textury brushes, standard procreate pencil brushes and Joe’s Fine Ink Line for inks. 

Do you do commissions?

Not right now, no. If I do, I’ll announce it, but on Patreon first. 

Do you have a patreon?

Yes, you can find it here. Support is much appreciated. 💛 

Do you have an online store?

Yes, thought it’s currently closed. Will reopen hopefully in 2025, for abouth a month. Likely Q3.

What’s Heart of Gold? 

Heart of Gold is a mystery/drama webcomic with overarching religious themes that revolves around the tenuous relationship which grows between the main characters Dunant and Ionel.

Is Heart of Gold on Hiatus? Will I be able to purchase volume 1 and 2 in print someday? 

Yes, it’s on hiatus. We sell volume 1 at conventions, and will do our best to sell it online as well. There are some plans for volume 2 in print.

What about your Curse of Strahd campaign/CoS art?

I love to share about our campaign! I have an artbook about it, or rather, the relationship between my PC Kasper and the NPC Lydia. I’d like to make a 2nd volume of it, and maybe something more gen too in print. Feel free to ask… Hoping to do more stuff for it, as always with a big LydiaKasper & Fiona focus haha

How do you color/do you pick your colors?

Honestly, I just experiment a lot. Use the color wheel! Look at how other artists you like use colors! This helps me more than anything. This, and curves sometimes. I’ve been planning to do a tutorial for patreon for a while now, but haven’t gotten around it yet.

What pronouns do you use?

They/Them and He/Him.

[visceralcoma]

To the people telling everyone not to pre-order the new Dragon Age:

I've just pre-ordered it for my friends. And pre-ordered the collector's merch. And the gilded artbook. And if they ever come out with the next volume of World of Thedas, I'm gonna pre-order that too.

My reasoning? You know how 20+ years ago, everyone bought and were crazy about either HP or Star Wars and bought all this merch and lined up to watch the movies?

Yeah I never did that for those. Never had a media I was "hyped" about like that. I don't like Star Wars, and while I like HP and write fic for it (to spite the author for hating people like me) I never bought merch for it or was mega hyped like HP superfans were with their house scarves and such.

but Dragon Age? This is that media for me. Everyone else had all their medias they went gaga for, lining up just to buy tickets and waiting months to one or two years for the next movie/book. But me? I've waited TEN years for the next dragon age. I'm gonna pre-order the fuck out of it.

[sonic-candy]

New Year Update

My first post of the year! TLDR: Updated socials, continued Megaman manga, started the OG Japanese version of Kirby Mania Manga, no new Astro Boy/ Atom the Beginning material, and may finally start writing because I'm a Rayman simp.

I updated my master post and added a Linktree for all of my social media accounts, including my BlueSky account. I haven't really used it yet, besides posting an introduction post.

Ongoing Projects

The Megaman Mega/Gigamix mangas are still in progress. I finished Gigamix Vol.1 a while ago and plan to eventually focus on Megamix Vol.2 in the future.

A new project I'm working on is the Kirby of the Stars: The Tale of Dedede in Pupupu Village. It's the original Japanese version of Kirby Manga Mania, which is just a greatest hits version collection of Hikawa Hirokazu (Did you know he also did the 90's Japanese Sonic the Hedgehog manga? Everything leads back to Sonic, Kirby or Astro Boy.) best/favorite stories and supposedly new stories (I only have the first 4 (Or 5?) volumes so I'm not sure If I can confirm that or not.) officially translated and published by VIZ media.

This means, however, that some stories may never get translated. And yes, you can read the official raw Japanese scans on the Corocoro website, but only certain chapters are viewable for a limited time before being locked. So after some searching and planning, I bought the complete 25 vols of The Tale of Dedede in Pupupu Village a few months ago. The glue binding is brittle so I can easily (yet carefully) rip out the pages and scan them easily. I should be done with vol.1 this month.

Other than this, I have no other Kirby-related projects.

Save for keeping tabs on some Moderno Tezuka coloring books,I have no Astro Boy/Atom the Beginning/Tezuka projects in the works. I'm currently looking for this Ehoba Doujinshi so If you know where I can grab it please contact me!

Writing

Got into Captain Laserhawk and of course, started simping over Rayman/Ramon and to a lesser extent Bullfrog. Sadly there is not a lot of printed media for me to post, as It's a fairly new IP (Only a year or so old), and I might get hit with a takedown notice if I post the manga/comic/artbook. So I can at least try to write about them. I'm still in the Kirby fandom so maybe I'll do some pieces on them too.

Ect.

Royal.V dropped a new song for the Rayman 2 fan remake so maybe I'll set up my YouTube channel and post the lost songs I discovered a while back? I also have some old PC games I want to archive, but I need to buy an external disk drive and honestly, this is pretty low on my to-buy and to-do list so it'll happen when it happens.

[ophexis]

2024!

I tend to try to make a yearly post on new year's so here it is lol

2024 was a bit of a hit and miss for me I guess. A big chunk of it was unbearably unpleasant and plagued by some of my worst bouts of depression in a while, but some things got a little better too.

A lot of stress was from my job, when I finished the project I had been working on for a few years and was put on a different project that I hated lmao. I was forced in office way more often, had to listen to my very unpleasant desk neighbors, and it immediatly made my arm and finger pain flares so much worse. It sucked so bad sdfsg. I had no energy to cook or clean or wash dishes or do anything and my appartment became a mess and everything sucked.

I changed department in october-ish, going from functionality QA to analytics QA. It's something I was remotely interested in but my project made me want to switch as soon as I could and I did. Analytics has been a lot more chill, my arm was able to heal and I can work from home as well. There's still some stress and impostor syndrome but at least things are more chill. There's a bit of worry over my job security for the coming year tho lol.

my maternal grandmother passed away this year, shortly before her birthday, and it was a bit rough, and I still think of her regularly and I miss her, but I hope she's having a nice restful time with grandpa up there.

My health has been so-so this year as well. I got some kind of stomach flu earlier in the year for the first time in litteral years, I had an extremely painful ear infection in october (idk if the stress just got me bad this year), and I'm currently wrangling with some other mysterious health situation that I'm currently doing tests for. While the initial tests didn't seem to show anything alarming, it's been stressful and also been occasionally impacting my daily life in an unpleasant way so yknow sdfsg. I'm hoping to get to the bottom of it this year.

at some point in october I realised I had to change some things bc I couldn't keep up with chores and it was becoming a problem, dishes in particular. It was stopping me from wanting to cook and I was letting stuff pile up, so I finally bought a dishwasher. There's no connection for dishwasher in my appartment so I went for a small countertop model I can hook to my sink and it's been a lifechanger. Unfortunately my kitchen ceiling is low so I can't actually leave it on my counter lol but I've been making it work. ideally I'd like to upgrade to a portable someday but $$$

this may sound dumb but I haven't forgotten about the sonic cookbook post I was supposed to make months ago. The job stress and everything else forced me to put it aside, but I recently found some places where I could source the peppers needed to make Sonic's chili, so I'm hoping I can make that post soon. And maybe feel motivated enough to resume my project of cooking from all my nerdy cookbooks.

Also this year I went to see Drum Tao, Sonic Symphony (which was incredible), Distant Worlds and TWRP live! I wanted to go to more shows so I think that was pretty good.

Collection-wise I slowed on figures but I got my hands on some manga, some artbooks, and several soundtracks so that's nice. I have also started a casual collection of specific dnd books, basically anything that has a significant enough section related to the drow, just before christmas I got my hands on the last 5e book I was looking for, so I'll be hunting for older books now. I already have PDFs of them all so in the worst case I'll probably print them for myself (maybe bind them myself? we'll see), but I'll keep my eye out for used copies. I want to get my hands on a few specific ttrpg books as well eventually but money's been a bit tighter so I haven't commited.

My living room is looking relatively finished now. I have a coffee table, 4 kitchen chairs. I'd like to get a dresser of some sort to put my printer on, and a better cart for my dishwasher, but it's looking nice, which is why i wanna focus on my bedroom now.

idk what to expect from 2025 but I would like to once again try to make more art (would be nice to actually commit to making a zine), get back into cosplay, take control of my bedroom mess which is still in the throes of the post-move clusterfuck (and get more furniture for it), improve my collection displays and maybe be able to unbox everything???. I'd like to put money aside to go to galaxy's edge. I'd like to cook more, and I'd like to spend quality time with my friends.

I hope everybody has a safe and peaceful new year!

[riddlerosehearts]

OKAY SO i said yesterday that i would make a post about how anime weekend atlanta went, so... basically it was a bit of a mixed bag because while i got to see tons of cool cosplays and merch and go to some neat panels, we (as in me and my dad who was traveling with me) ended up not only having car troubles the entire weekend but also had some absolutely ridiculous problems with ordering food. just as an example, one night we ordered a pizza and it took 3 hours to arrive and we never got told there would be any kind of delay 😭 BUT i will go ahead and share my cosplays and then list off some good things that happened! i'm slightly embarrassed about posting my face on here since i've never done that before but here goes:

i was edward elric on thursday and friday at AWA and lilia vanrouge (pop music club version) on saturday and sunday! i did a bunch of thrifting and DIYing (and pulling things i already owned out of my closet for lillia lmao) for both of these and i am especially proud of that automail glove. i also went to two twisted wonderland cosplay photoshoots on both saturday and sunday which was definitely fun, and i met todd haberkorn while in my ed cosplay and got him to autograph the same fullmetal alchemist artbook that i've previously had signed by caitlin glass! i also bought a handful of silly little trinkets and i will put photos of all this other stuff under a cut so people who don't care don't have it clogging their dash too badly.

^ full group photo + some diasomnia photos of the saturday twst photoshoot. shoutout to the summer lilia who offered to princess carry malleus and the person who showed up as meleanor--two things which are both seriously impressive to me in different ways.

^ the photo i took with todd haberkorn + the artbook cover he signed. you can see where he signed his name right over ling and where, when i met caitlin last year, she signed her name right over winry. i met him once before but it was literally 10 years ago and it was great to be able to meet him again. he told me he thinks ling deserves his own FMA spinoff, and i very much agree with him.

^ some of the silly merch i bought. i also wanted to buy the official castle in the sky artbook as well as these kingdom hearts plushies so badly and still might buy them online later:

and uhhh i think that's all i feel like sharing on here?? i wish i had gotten to go to more panels but the various unexpected issues i had throughout the con kept me from having the time to go to many, although the ones i did get to see were great. there was one where a nuclear propulsion plant operator and NASA software engineer graded various sciencey anime on how good or bad their science was and did a very thorough examination of whether or not the premise of planetes--a screw hitting a spaceship, putting a hole in it, and taking out an intercontinental suborbital flight--was plausible. he concluded that it is and gave the overall series an A+ for scientific accuracy, and i've never seen this show but now i want to.

okay actually NOW that's all! if you cared enough to read this post then you deserve this bonus photo from when i got home yesterday, decided to put my ed cosplay back on and take extra photos of it, and subsequently got attacked by my cat:

[minhio22]

It was a while ago but during the international book fest i caved in and bought tot artbook and i love it🙏🙏🙏

[qan-t]

i bought the dear meisters artbook a while ago and now that i’ve started actively learning japanese i’m using it for practice the page size is large, so the characters are all very clear and readable, and the kanji are glossed with hiragana that indicate how they should be pronounced -- though only in the manga portions. (yun kouga’s comments on the character designs are waaaaay beyond my understanding for now.) having familiarity with translations of most of those stories (i don’t think anyone ever did alle’s...) helps too and this is unrelated to that, but as those pictures indicate, the individual stories are printed in the image color of the respective meister the story’s about. it’s a cool detail! i want to eventually get to the level where i can translate all the stories that nobody else ever got around to. but that’ll be a while yet. for now, it’s back to the kanji grind. send help.

[zeondraws]

Okay so I thought of making a post showing all my art related books. I shall begin with DC comics

I am a fan of the Legion of Super-heroes, it is unfortunate that they don't get alot of attention in todays media and are barely known in Germany. I had to import a bunch of them from America which was already a hard task to find a seller who'd be willing to do that. But I got them either way!

Only thing I didn't read here was this thick book I bought at a comic store all those years ago, somehow it doesn't speak my interest that much but it also showcases all the appearances of the legionnaires in the old comic books.

Then I have these 4 magazines from ImagineFX, I find the content really cool where they showcase so many different artists I haven't seen before. Also the old magazines have the extra content on a website where you can easily access the downloadable files of any other magazine from that time by editing the URL. Tho alot might not be useable or because I don't use Photoshop. Well I could pirate it, but also I am spooped of catching viruses.

These ones got recommended to me by a friend, I am so amazed of Simons works and the way the storytelling takes place. I wish to be able to draw like him one day, it would be so cool to be able to properly visualise everything I'd imagine.

Oh boy this is a big bunch.

I haven't read all of them thus far, my school stress and worries made me not touch some of them at all since purchase, but I'll try to change that the coming months.

I wasn't a big fan of Conan and Metro, it's not my taste in comics. Perdida for example was a really neat one with a huge twist at the end. It honestly flabbergasted me.

And Myre + Radius are my favourite ones among these comic books. They're the first ones I purchased from Splitter Verlag.

Oh boy and here we have all my books from 3D total (tomorrow I'll get a few more)

Some I still have to read, two I already finished and 3 of them I already started reading.

I got the Composition & Narrative one on Christmas day. The Hermes delivery guy was also playing music when he was at the door. Like a Santa Claus haha.

These ones are from all different kinds of book retailers. I saw the Procreate one in my local bookshop and was like, "I need that" and it helped me greatly.

I remember importing the Legends of the Guardians book directly from Australia. It took a while to arrive but it came in December of 2020? I believe. Really gorgeous artworks in there, I love owls so much.

4 of the books were gifted to me, which are equally as cool. I loove the animal anatomy books I got from my dutch friend.

Last books I have here are from different things. Firstly blender... I, I know there are free internet tutorials. But I am stupid so I need a book where everything is written down so I don't melt my brain trying to google a solution. It's reaaaally big

I haven't read the Nier artbook yet, but maybe soon.

The other two are as seen from avatar and alita battle angel. I went through both of thwm and really enjoy the contents presented in there. I still remember watching Alita back in the cinema, I was soooo mindblown by everything, and the OST of the movie just rocks.

Oh boy I don't think my artbook obsession will ever stop, they atleast greatly help me learning new things for my own artworks. Yes there are youtube tutorials but I also would like to read up on things.

I can't wait to look at the contents of my new books tomorrow. I must absorb the knowledge into my brain!

[lemon-wedges]

How about some mangakas

Q Hayashida

God. Q's work makes me feel INSANE. I bought her Mud and Sludge artbook forever ago and the experiance of flipping thru every page of pure grudge topped with piss colors.....q's world, characters and style make me want to take a shower everytime I take a dip. And what can i say? I'm in love with sludge

Ryo Suzuri

While Q may have one crunchy ass style the characters were brimming love and loyalty for their friendships and relationships. Ryo tho? It you want the most beautiful and delicate line art paired with the most fucked and tragic storyline that least u emotionally exhausted well.....there u go...

I get so mad sometimes that they're consistently able to trick me by drawing the softest of somber scenes between characters and I KNOW I KNOW ITS FAKE I KNOW MAKOTO IS USING EVERYONE AND YET. ...and yet the cycle of violence must continue.... 👍

(Also warning if u do want to look these artist up. These series are EXTREMELY violent and gorey. Q at least has that shonen angle so there is some good fights and silly antics in-between. RYo meanwhile is filled with non-con. )

Actually....ending with ryo makes me kinda sad......

How about we look at some cute house wife genos together....

Nights are a little hard for me right now so before bed ill just talk about some of my fav artists

wilhelm m busch

Simple, clean, fluid. Ahhhhhhhhhh so many of his figures are nicely shaped, and his pen feels like it never stops moving. I've learned that a well placed squiggle where clothing fold should be do a pretty good job conveying what u need

Denys wortman

I'm always sad there's not much of his work online. I bought his book a while ago and mWUAH. This guy is a genuis at handling crowd composition. Groups of 2 groups of 5 groups of 10 groups of 50??? Hes done them all. He makes pencil work look so easy. Do u know how many sketchbook drawings I've destroyed because I wanted to try out his shading???

Not much honestly. I gotta practice more

[orcelito]

Current persona manga collection 👍

I decided to get the 3rd volume of mementos mission and the 9th volume of the p5 manga since I have a Bit of free spending money now. It makes me very happy to have a growing collection 😊

[mythicamagic]

I bought the Ikemen Sengoku artbook a while ago and forgot to upload some of my favourite pages, so lookit! The art is gorgeous!

[fayrinferno]

Movie CD Dramas Translation

Against all advice, I picked up the two Escaflowne movie drama CDs called the "Prologue" and some interesting things happened. I mentioned that I might translate those in indefinite future in one of the previous posts, and then @radical-rad1986 reminded me that a fan translation of them already exists (or existed, the website is now defunct).

I've never even played the CDs since I bought them few years ago (I don't keep a CD/DVD -ROM/player/ with me by now... shame, but I don't need it in my daily life anymore) but I just had some time now so I took out the lost technology and listened to them for the first time, all the while looking at the translation as I went... aaand I noticed a few things that seemed to have been missed in that translation. I decided to sort of... suggest changes to that translated script, cause it seemed more or less okay to me, with some tweaks.

But as I went on, even I could hear that it got a bit wild and strayed further from the original in places, so I just did my own transcripts to be sure (no I am still in no way fluent in Japanese) and did a totally fresh translation of many of the lines. I'm pretty confident in the job I did there and I wanna show you guys, cause if you've ever read the translation above (or even if you do so now), I think that the whole thing will make more sense with those things fixed.

I started quite a few translation projects already and I wasn't planning to do this one on top, just was curious and wanted to check casually. But then this happened cause I have no impulse control. I know I tease great many things already but I guess my mental state right now is 'better do something that I'm into right now rather than procrastinate and fall into the dark mental pit of nothingness'.

TL;DR Expect a movie drama translation sometime this year, I swear it is interesting too, otherwise I wouldn't bother with it.

@umadashibayashiashibayashi @coverteyes

I'll use this post to reply to you, since it's somehow related: Thanks for the interest and support! Of course, I will continue translating the novels, too, I just like to switch between things whenever I get bored/burned out. Regarding the novels, since I was able to proceed at a faster pace than anticipated, I thought maybe I'd publish the first results after I'm done with the first book. Before that, I will probably publish some more artbook translations @heavenlydragon. Those have been beta-read just need to straighten some details and they're ready to go. It's the rest of this book.

I would like to have all the translations beta-read like the Marlene Chapter since I'm an ESL and the outcome of juggling three languages in my head is... not always comprehensible (I hope this post is at least a but cause I'm chotto braindead after this translating session), but we'll see. Maybe I'll just post them in their unholy state, haha. I'm again tempted to look into the website options to publish these things somewhere with a bit more... structure than a blog, too. Thing is just, I'm into translating right now, as you can clearly see ^^; I did quite a lot of it already (it looks like quite an obsession I realize) but it feels pretty rewarding with the new information and people's feedback/appreciation tbh! So thanks, I will continue translating, too! Always hoping for more inspiration to come my way~

[profnic]

Allow me to present a page from the official artbook published by Larian and available in the "DLC" or for those who bought the EA version of the game.

If you can't read the text: "Two hundred years ago, Astarion was a corrupt elite of Baldur’s Gate with a taste for power and a hunger for eternal life. It wasn’t long before these desires became a nightmarish reality. Transformed into the vampire spawn of a sadistic master, Astarion was kept as a slave to lure fresh noble blood to the palace of Cazador – all while subsisting on the putrid blood of rats."

So, yes, it isn't stated outright in the game that Astarion was a corrupt offical, but it is there in the official material about the character. Could the artbook have been finished before they decided to remove that aspect from Astarion and they never went back and removed it? Totally. But it is still official material saying that Astarion was corrupt.

A corrupt elite doesn't mean he also couldn't be punitive in his rulings. It just means that some of those rules could be swayed with money or favors. And for a man poor enough to steal an apple to eat Astarion wouldn't show lenience because that man couldn't pay.

Here's a link to the book on archive(dot)org if you wanted to look for yourself

I'm not even a fan of a corrupt mortal Astarion - I don't think it matters - I agree who he is in the game and what is show there matters most. But like there is clear evidence for corrupt mortal Astarion for the fans who like it.

Maybe it’s an unpopular opinion, but I think everything there is to know about Astarion—and this applies to the other characters as well—is already abundantly present in the game, without necessarily having to dig through comments, scripts, interviews, or whatever else. The game is there, and it’s clear. The informations are all there—in the scenes, the dialogues, the notes written by characters within the narrative. Why would writers and developers hide anything? It doesn’t make sense! What isn’t there simply isn’t there.

That said, I won’t deny that creating theories or knowing what the director, actor, writer, artbook, or D&D manual have to say is fascinating! But sometimes, it really feels like people are desperately trying to grab onto this or that piece of information and forcefully drag it into the game when it simply isn’t there…

Like the idea of Astarion being a corrupt magistrate, when, based on what happens and what he says in the game, Astarion is actually more like a judge so severe and ruthless that he’d sentence a starving man to death just for stealing an apple! That’s the complete opposite of corruption—he’s inflexible, merciless, a bastard in his position as the enforcer of the law (and therefore the one holding the power to make decisions, which he may have once enjoyed), yes, but not corrupt! And this is just my conclusion as well, something the game suggested to me, but nothing definitive since there’s no confirmation.

And even his supposed affiliation with Cazador is never mentioned anywhere. If there had been any connection, Cazador could have easily exposed him when facing a heroic Tav/Durge, saying something like: “Do you know what this filthy magistrate used to do for me?” But instead, nothing—what Cazador emphasizes over and over again is how he was the one who made Astarion what he is.

And when it comes to the Gur attack, the only information we have is either pure coincidence (Cazador might have followed the scent of Astarion’s blood) or a vague possibility that the vampire lord had already been watching him for his own reasons and simply appeared at the right moment to “save” him. That’s it.

And that's it, as usual, it's just my thought.

[fourseasonsfigs]

Fig Stands

My fig stands arrived a couple days ago in my big sea shipment package, which was very exciting. I've been waiting for these for a very long time! I was so excited that I felt the need to post about them. I realize this post could be of fairly limited interest to all but the most die-hard figthusiasts, but there's still some pics of cute figs in it to tempt you (I hope)!

A Typical Problem in the Day of a Figthusiast:

The majority of my figs can stand on their own, but a not-insubstantial number range from very precarious on their little feet to totally unable to stand up without some assistance.

For instance, these little guys, if you recall them from this post.

That one tiny foot does not in ANY way balance OR support their big ol' heads, and they need some significant help to stand upright.

I had bought some Museum Putty/Wax, but I didn't want to semi/permanently stick the figs' feet down to the acrylic ziggurat stands that I put my figs on, because I want to be able to pick the figs up and look at them. I wasn't really sure what to do, and was amassing a whole bunch of figs that were just lying in temporary storage waiting for me to figure it out.

One day several months ago, I was browsing one of my fig progress groups and saw someone posting pictures of round disks for the figs to stand on. She had a purchase link, but it was some sales platform that I had never heard of and can't access at all (I can't recall the name).

So, I took myself to Taobao and started browsing around. It wasn't actually too hard to find a listing, so I placed an order for about 10 bucks worth through Superbuy, and waited for them to arrive. And waited. And waited. Almost three weeks later, Superbuy got back to me saying the seller said they were out of stock and refunded me.

So that was a bummer. I went back on Taobao and found a different seller and put the order in:

These are acrylic disks 4 mm thickness x 4 cm diameter, which seemed like the most reasonable size, and a pack of 10 was about 72 cents at the time. I bought 12 packs of them for $8.64. Due to their weight, I opted to have Superbuy send them to me via Matson sea shipping, which is slower than air shipping but much, much cheaper for heavy things.

These shipped from the seller quickly within a couple days, and then sat in my SB warehouse for some time while I was waiting for some other artbooks to ship. Finally, I had enough stuff to put a package together, so out they went. This sea shipment actually arrived the fastest ever - 21 days, which is a record for speed for them to me.

Here they are! This is one half of the order. The disk on the left is unpeeled - I haven't peeled off the protective clear layer that's on both sides that keeps the acrylic from being scratched. The middle one is partially peeled, so you can see it in progress, and the last disk on the right is fully peeled on both sides. You can see it is a lot clearer than the one on the left.

Here's another shot of the disks - unpeeled to the left, and fully peeled to the right. It's perfectly clear and transparent.

Here's all my fig-holding paraphernalia. It turns out the Museum Putty doesn't hold all that well for fig purposes - it's not sticky enough to really grab onto the very small feet of these figs. It'll work in some circumstances, but too easily detaches. The Museum Wax works really well, as it's quite sticky, but it also gets everywhere, and I have to continually wash my hands and clean up a bit of a tacky residue very carefully. It's just hard to handle.

I have not yet found a separate source to buy the stickers independently, but I'll need to as I don't actually have a ton of them. They work great, but like any type of stickers, aren't meant for constant sticking and unsticking, since they will deform (they're stretchy). Since they do, in fact, work very well, they adhere the fig pretty tightly to a surface. I don't like tugging at the figs to get them to detach from wherever they've been stuck. Seems like a good way to break a fig.

The fig stickers come in different configurations/sizes, and sellers sometimes include a few in the boxes when they send the figs. This fig's foot is quite small, so here I am measuring his feet to the right sticker size. This one I have him on (the most common size and shape) is too big for that little sneaker.

These little ones are just right!

I generally peel off the sticker on one side and stick it to their feet, and then go do something else for a while to give the sticker time to bond with their foot. If you try to peel off the other side right away, I've found you end up peeling the sticker off the foot instead, and then it's easy to mess up the sticker trying to get it positioned back exactly right.

Once I give the sticker a little bit of time, I come back and the other side usually peels off without too much difficulty. Then, it's just carefully positioning the fig on the base and pressing it firmly down to get it to adhere.

I rapidly found there's a wrong way to press:

This seemed like the most obvious way to make sure the sticker sticks firmly, and it's what I did at first, before quickly realizing that was putting way too much strain on the delicate neck area.

Instead, what I've learned to do is gently grasp the torso and press it down to adhere it to the base.

And there we go! Running figs on the loose! Go get him, Junjun!

[link to Master Fig Index if you want some actual fig posts!]