The sword looks sightly less crappy than before, but it's still not good enough for a close-up. Got some more detail-painting to do on it yet...

For an unrelated project, I've recently had to teach myself how to Diamondback Braid leather strips around a PVC handle. I took some footage of my fumbling attempts at figuring it out and turned the results into a tutorial:



I hope you find it useful. (It should come in handy for giving your prop swords nicely braided handles. And for making those little Chinese finger trap thingies. Whee.)

You know what I hate just as much as I hate long anime? Deciding to do some tiny little extra detail on a project, and have it wind up taking as much time as the rest of the project. (Case in point - I'm working on a gunblade and I wanted to make the cylinder all "rotate-y"--even thought I know I don't HAVE to. However, just planning out and constructing the cylinder has taken me at least 5 hours. No WONDER I never have any spare time to do anything anymore....)

Well, except for make more YouTube videos. Took a break from the automail thing to put together a tutorial on prop sizing and proportion.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtQBjzaUsUs

I know there's a lot of annoying scrolling text in there, but since it beat the alternative (lots of annoying halting narration by ME) I figured I had no choice but to do things that way. (And I don't think I'll ever be able to narrate a video. I get so nervous about talking to strangers that I can't even order a pizza over the phone or talk to an answering machine. )

Let me know what you think of the video and if you have any questions, okay?


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I know this is pretty sucktacular as far as videos go, but it is my first one and it took a long time. (It's also on a subject that no one is probably interested in, but I thought it would make for a quick tutorial so here it is:)



I'm currently working on revamping my FMA automail tutorial, (which will most likely be text with snippets of video here and there. I am taking video of my current automail project as I go along, although it's been a struggle to get footage which doesn't look like "moving dark blur hotgluing something onto stationary dark blur".) I'm completely re-doing the automail pattern as well so it should be worth your while to stay tuned...

Soooo tired. Didn't realize video editing was that much work. I used Windows movie editor...thingie.... I don't know...I'm goin' to bed....zzzzzzz