Nature's Attack Helicopter

The humble dragonfly: coming to a display case near you on my shelf!

Finally am getting back into the crafting thing after a little rough patch (life got me down, but I am slowly getting back to normality), and I decided to try one of Piececool's Gemsect series of kits. I picked up all of them as a bundle a while back but haven't had the time or energy or a clear workbench to do any model building until now.

Then, having made as much of the box as I could, finished my cushion covers and not yet started my next sewing projects (that's my very next post :p), I found that I could finally pluck a kit from the stack of tiny boxes and make my first Gemsect. The planets had, indeed, aligned.

So I chose Nature's Apache, the gunship of the skies, death on four wings: the 'Amber Dragonfly' model.

(Dragonflies are some of the most efficient and effective predators alive today - thankfully the oxygen concentration in Earth's atmosphere is too low for them to grow [says the modern theory] as large as they used to hundreds of millions of years ago. We get 19cm wingspan dragonflies, not 70cm behemoths!)

This particular dragonfly is tiny though. It's 6cm with an 8.5cm wingspan. The Gemsect kits are some of the smallest in terms of number of pieces and overall simplicity of build - the number of curved parts does add back to the complexity in its own way though so there's still some challenge. There were just under twenty different types of piece, all snipped out of one and a half sheets that were, well, not much bigger than a credit card.

I tell you, some of those pieces were tiny as hell, I gave up on bending the settings around the 'pearl' gems - I glued them in and bent the settings around them after! Too tiny to do it any other way, even using dainty little craft tweezers to hold them, getting a good grip on the gem and setting and also being able to get a good angle to pliers the setting into place properly was hard.

But enough of my blather, here's the WIP pics!

A few notable features: the wings are made of two layers. The under layer has a black rainbow-sheen coating that, as seen from above, gives the wings even more of an ornate, dazzling look.

The thorax was all curves and the biggest PITA piece I've run into yet from PC. It's also supposed to hold one of a pair of magnets that came with the kit, but that's for if you'd like to wear it as a brooch or something so I just left the magnet out.

The resulting model is now sat in my display box, which is next to the display cabinet, on top of a chest of drawers. It holds all the super little things like my FFXIV job stones and my (to be built) Gemsects. Once I've built a few more, I'll crack the photo box back out and take some nicer photos, it'll be Model Mayhem all over again!