More Supplies

I bought a bunch of stuff over the last two weeks and am starting to experiment with them. Here's the Aves Apoxie Sculpt, which comes in two containers instead of a tube like the 5 minute epoxy putty. It also has a working time of 1-3 hours instead of 5 minutes and comes in various colors - I got white to match the tone of resin.


The safety solvent lets you smooth and feather this stuff out nicely. It also seems to work with regular epoxy putty, but there is a finer difference in the putty grain with Apoxie Sculpt. I think this stuff will work out really nice, was actually cheaper than the tube stuff by weight, 1 pound for $12, and it supposedly can be frozen to extend the shelf life.

I also got this 5 second gel resin to try out. Originally intended for use on fingernails to smooth out the surface before painting, you brush it on and it fills pin holes ready to be sanded in 5 seconds. At least, that's how it's supposed to work. I'll have to see if it really does on the next kit, it was pretty expensive too, so it'd better work!

And last, a new nozzle for my G44 airbrush, which had started to feel like I was fighting it to get a fine mist. I knew nozzles and needles would wear eventually and need replacement, but since I'm still fairly new to this, I didn't know how to tell when it needed replacing. Well, I think when you feel like you are fighting with your airbrush after having just cleaned all the parts, it needs replacement. ^^;; Comparing the two nozzles under a loupe, it's easy to tell the opening has grown larger on the old nozzle (it's trumpeted) due to perhaps excessive force cleaning it or just regular wear. After replacing it, it's like night and day and back to being a joy to use. Best part - it was just $4 for a new nozzle. ^^

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Color calibration

I took Stan's color calibrator for a spin this weekend to see how it works. I've been using the display optimization wizard in the Nvidia control panel along with the Lagom LCD tests to adjust my displays. But, while they looked fine to me, I never really knew if the colors were correct or not. Here was the chance to find out.


The calibration software starts off working like normal calibration tests - set the contrast, set the brightness, set the color temp, but the nice thing here is you get to actually test it. The i1 calibrator lets you adjust the monitors white balance compared to a known color temperature. You adjust the monitors RGB settings through its OSD and the i1 measures the result and moves RGB sliders around in a dialog box. Changing one value of R, G or B can cause multiple sliders to move in opposite directions, so it's like a mini game to get all the sliders centered in the middle. Once you do, you have the correct color of white.


Once contrast, brightness and color temp are correct, it runs through a long sequence of color squares measuring and creating a gamma curve for each color. When it's done the gamma curves are written to an ICC profile which is then set as the default for the desktop and calibration is complete. You can then switch between the before and after to compare the new calibration to the previous setting.


This is the before and after, taken with a camera so you can see what the monitor is actually putting out. The left half is the before calibration colors and the right half is the after calibration colors. Can you tell the difference?

It's very subtle, and the most noticeable change is the two inner grey squares, which have a slight tint before calibration and are neutral grey after calibration. The gamma curves are fairly linear with the widest correction occurring in the mid tones.

Now how does this work for a TV? I ran it on my HTPC attached to the Samsung A550. The Samsung has settings for custom color space, but the generated ICC profile is only valid on the computer input. However, the temperature settings can be applied to all inputs, so the TV (ota/cable/sat/etc) can be adjusted for the color of white, which I think is the most important part anyway. Given the before and after colors, it seems any decent gamma optimizer, like the Lagom tests or those built-in to your display driver, should do a good enough job for non-professional use.

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[figure] Angel Rebirth

This is the SOL Models kit of Angel Rebirth from GUNNM/Battle Angel Alita. If you're interested in how this was made, you can follow my work in progress here.

This is resin kit number 6 for me and the largest one I've tackled so far. The body contains multiple parts that are hard to make seamless given how the parts must be assembled. I don't think I want to build another kit with so much skin.. ^^;; I took a long break in between building her, but picking up the airbrush again was pretty simple. I'm glad she's finally done.

Medium: airbrushed acrylics on resin. Scale: 1/6 @ 23cm. 20 photos in this set.

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