Yuri Mania 37

Gokigenyou! Seems like tradition now that when I'm about to leave for a week to an anime convention (Anime Expo again this year), I leave with a yuri post here. Last year it was the dakimakura yuri and the year before it is the docking oppai mousepads. This year... Well, you'll see :P

The Melancholy of Saber Lily Part 59

Seems like Haruhi got a new toy... And so do I :P Got this from a local anime goods shop and I thought I had to get it, lol.

The Melancholy of Saber Lily Part 60

And yes... They were both available on sale. I HAD TO GET THEM BOTH!

They're pretty small actually. About the size of 2 or 3 figmas. I wonder how they compare to DD or dolls... I haven't tried yet :P

The Melancholy of Saber Lily Part 61

Yep... This time it's docking mini dakimakura, hahaha. I also made a gif version where you can see on the Melancholy of Saber Lily site amongst the previous 4koma I've made collected in one place ;)

And here are some more docking pictures, lol.

Parting shot ^^;;; See you at AX 2011 if you're going!

Yuri Mania 36

Gokigenyou! As some of you may have seen on Figure.FM, this picture drawn by Yakuri_Moe got lots of attention in the 100th Weekly Lily. It's got quite a story behind it actually.


Yaku approached me weeks before it was time for #100 to see if she can contribute any drawing for it. I was ecstatic, but I had no idea at the time what kind of picture I'm looking for. After a few minutes I had an image of Mugi fantasizing about Saber and Haruhi in a yuri relationship where Saber is the top.

Fast forward on the night I was going to post #100, I gave the idea that's in my head to Yaku and she quickly drew, scanned, outlined everything so fast that I wasn't even ready for it. Some days your body just can't be ready for anything... When I opened the picture... I. LAUGHED. SO. HARD! Not only did the image in my mind came to life, but it exceeded my expectation! It's almost like Yaku was reading my mind and traced the image from my head and put her own twist into it xD I just loved all the faces in the art!

So that was about 3-4 weeks ago... And now it's been 2 years since I started Yuri Mania here and Weekly Lily... I must do something special and I knew I was going to bring Yaku's art back in action. I loved it way too much... So now, not only is it the 2nd year anniversary, but it's also... the 50th Melancholy of Saber Lily!

The Melancholy of Saber Lily Part 50

Ah Mugi... Why are you so good at bringing my imagination to life? ^_^ As always, this 4koma has been posted on The Melancholy of Saber Lily site... The title is a bit lame, lol, but it was basically like Inception, except it's a fantasy within a fantasy within a fantasy. It's unfortunate I had to split the 3rd panel in two like that... I just ran out of panels for what I want to do XD

I wanted Mugi to look like she's relaxing while enjoying the picture by Yaku ^^ So that's why one of her legs is raised up.

And of course I gotta put in a bigger picture of the kissing scene! So hard to get the pose I want ^^; In the end, they didn't turn out so bad ;)

Here's a close-up... Also the picture I used in the dream bubble of the 4th panel. I'm so glad that Saber casual had that eyes-closed face ^^

But to be honest... Their face never touched each other ^^;;; But very close!

This was another hard photo to take. I wanted to get everyone's face to be clear in it, but the manual focus and macro option was giving me a bit of a hard time. Finally I was able to get this one before I had to finish the photo session :D

A bit of a short post, I know ^^; It's been quite a busy last few weeks/months for me. Anyway... Here's one last picture, the same 4koma as above, but with a slight change ;)

*cough*forYaku*cough*

Yuri Mania 35: Mugi Vision

Gokigenyou minna. As you can see above it's Mugi... And you know how it is when Mugi has that look in her eyes. Well the point of this post is to celebrate the 100th Weekly Lily in Figure.fm. The premise actually came about when I asked around what I should do for it... My comrade at arms (and Mugi's waifu), Yakuri_Moe, suggested  something to do with Mugi Vision. I liked that idea and worked it in my head and well... You know how it is in my head; it will not be clean at all ^^;

So let's put that in The Melancholy of Saber Lily 4koma and see what happens ;P I didn't just make one, nor two but FIVE 4koma! ENJOY! Oh and this post shouldn't be looked at if you're at work...

The Melancholy of Saber Lily Part 45

So the premise is simple. Haruhi is giving Mugi the power to change her visions into reality ^^; You have no idea how hard it was to get all 5 Haruhi together. Chouyusha Haruhi kept falling over and cheerleader Haruhi can only stand on one knee. And they fall over once I put the knee pit licking Haruhi in there... Uh... Yeah...

The Melancholy of Saber Lily Part 46

To be honest this was somewhat forced ^^; I wanted to include Saber Lily for sure, but I couldn't figure out what joke I can play with, but if the joke doesn't work, you still get a Saber orgy in 2 panels :P Figma Saber and Figma Saber Alter were difficult to place together. Uh and I wanted a classier premier of Saber Extra, but oh well, close enough. Below you can see a closer look at the Saber orgy ^_^

Casual Saber eating from her "bowl of rice"...

Revoltech Saber doesn't want to kiss at first...

I like how you can see through Saber Extra's skirt to see casual Saber's ahoge...

The Melancholy of Saber Lily Part 47

I guess Mugi gets another wish ^^;;; Should I even explain? Now I wonder who's the first lucky girl to get skinship from Mugi Aldra? ^o^

It's all in the details... Uh... I don't mean the Revoltech Aldra, though very well detailed she is. I recoloured Aldra's hair for the 4koma to make her blonde like Mugi. Very minor detail, but I wanted to make that distinction that it's Mugi in Aldra's outfit ^^

The Melancholy of Saber Lily Part 48

So which is it? Which part is a dream and which part is reality? =P Oh and I broke Azunyan's neko paw hand in one of these shoots... The peg broke inside and I was trying to get it out with a plier, but I just pushed it in more. So I said screw it and used a screwdriver (har har!) to grind the peg to powder and pulled out the rest when the peg was all gone. Gotta thank Optic for this because I found his broken Figma hand post on my phone and somehow used that method. Figma hands are different since his post, but still similar technique can be used. I used a 1.44 mm screwdriver btw.

The Melancholy of Saber Lily Part 49

So who saw this joke coming when you know that Figma Luka comes with a giant tuna? I at first did not consider getting Luka at all, but then I realized I could make this joke after seeing the preview of the tuna ^^; At first I was gonna get Haruhi to be in Mugi's role, but this Weekly Lily special and Luka came at the same time that I thought I could use it this way ^^ Oh and sorry if Mugi is out of character or anything XD Everyone gets their own characteristics in my head, lol.

It was hard for Figma Luka to bend on the bench and was hard to bring her leg up for the second panel, but I worked with it. Anyway, notice anything different with the picture above and the one in the 4koma?

Maybe I should've washed my hand first?

That's right! It's Mio's face in Mugi's head, which means she doesn't have Mugi's takuan eyebrows. This picture was something I was going to use to change Mio's eyebrows, but I used the wrong face for Mugi to get the eyebrows from. I still used it for a colour reference though.

I posted the above picture as a teaser in Weekly Lily 99. I made sure it turned out different :) So you're looking at an early Weekly Lily 100 right here ^_^  I'll add some more extras later in the Figure.FM post, so keep an eye out for that. Now what do I do for the 50th Melancholy of Saber Lily 4koma...

Iron Miku 2+

I thought I'd try out another stop motion with Iron Miku. It's good timing too that the home video release of Iron Man 2 is coming out in 3 more days over here. Good timing, right? ...Well to be honest, I've been working on this since the beginning of this month and I got really lazy to finish it up until now. Oh and I did have that shoulder pain around Labor Day, so I have a part of an excuse to not be able to work on this.

However, I realized that I should finish this, especially for today, since today is my second Blogday. Yep, I've been blogging for 2 years now. Time flies. Last year I did a custom Gundam project, same with the first year I started. I don't have much time this year unfortunately, but I did work on this project... I guess I'll use it to celebrate this second year ^^;

Unlike the first Iron Miku "stop-motion" project, I wanted to somehow fit the transformation into the 4koma comic. I realize that I don't have the coding skills to do that, so I did whatever's close... So I don't want to delay this anymore and let you have a go at it...

The Melancholy of Saber Lily Part 39

 

Ironically I didn't realize myself that I put Miku in the 39th Melancholy of Saber Lily 4koma... What a coincidence! Everything just seems to fall into place, hahaha. Anyway... I'm planning to do a full video for this particular part just to make it flow better, but I have no time yet...

You can read the rest of the 4koma on the Melancholy of Saber Lily site.

Just let me say that I was way too ambitious again to do this... I don't think I was able to make everything work the way it should've work in my mind. I was still too lazy to move the figures slightly to make an actual stop motion, so I let all the Photoshop editing do all the work this time. Maybe if I had more time...

A deleted scene. It's Miku reaching in, but I think it looks like she just fell on to the book ^^;

Right about now I feel like doing what Miku is doing in the above picture... Just slam myself down and get some rest... But I still got that one more video to make. I did have a retrospect post for my first year of blogging... I don't know if I'll be doing one or not this year. I'm completely tuckered out. The only thing that kept me sane while creating this project was the new Netflix Canada, and I watched a lot of Mythbusters for almost the whole time I was working on this. Oh and if anyone's curious how long I did this... I have no idea... I didn't keep track of how long I did this, lol. It's only 20 seconds after all, but it felt like 20 days worth of work with what I got.

EDIT: Here's the video version of the 4koma comic.

Finally finished it after a lot of procrastination. Found quite a lot of challenge with it, mostly I had to re-edit the original transformation so it looks better. I added sound effects and added more music since it's longer. This was actually quite fun when I almost finished the video. I'm surprised it worked out... The timing is a little off, but it's not too bad... Phew!

Anyhoo, in case I don't do an annual blog retrospect... Thank you very much everyone who supported, commented, contributed, read, wrote about, visited my blog! It's been a hell of a year, and I couldn't do a lot of these without you who are out there reading this. I'd list my blog stats and all, but that's not very interesting even if there are almost 92,000 visitors and over 150,000 page views...... Thank you! I hope I'll still be here for the third year ^^;

Haruhi Vs the AmAzone Saber

I normally don't start with the 4koma comic, but I think this is a good introduction to one of my latest acquisition ^^ Oh oh... don't forget the title...

The Melancholy of Saber Lily Part 38

This has also been posted on The Melancholy of Saber Lily site. For the first panel I had to do 2 photos just because I couldn't make it work with the macro lens when I was standing trying to take a picture of Haruhi shaking in my hand... Saber would've been too blurry. Yes, I know what you're thinking... Haruhi's attacked a 1/3 scale Dollfie Dream before so why would she be afraid here. Well perhaps that Unlimited Span... Saber Works scared her off.

Here's the bigger picture of the last panel. I had to lean Saber to the wall because her armor and the sword are all metal and her flimsy little body can't support it all up. Which makes me wonder how the original Saber handles all that armor...

I was going to use this as the last two panels as one panel instead of the two panels up there. Which one would've been better I wonder?

Here's a better comparison side by side of Saber and Haruhi. Saber is a 1/6 Hybrid Action Figure by Azone. So she's double the size of Haruhi. I was going to have Saber's left hand patting Haruhi's head, but she's much bigger that her hand couldn't reach Haruhi's head!

The obligatory box picture

I saw her back when I was looking to spend 20,000 yen from Tenso at Amazon Japan. If I had bought her back then I would've spend it all on just this one. I'm someone who prefer to spend little money to get many things instead of buying one expensive thing. They both add up to the same thing usually ^^; When I saw Yumyu from Figure.FM was selling his at a lower price than what I saw, I jumped on the chance. This Saber actually arrived in the beginning of June and only now I felt like posting about it, lol.

Here is the whole set. She's got her "Holiday" dress as well. She's brand new and only been taken out of the box once.

She looks great! Lots of metallic parts. Her always smiling face is a bit odd with her armor on though.

Caliburn is all metal and they didn't bother painting the hilt.

Close-up of the chest plate

Even though she is brand new in box, she is not quite new. I thought the plate on her boots can come off, but it's actually the glue that's wearing off.

Her gauntlets are quite heavy and if her hands are just dangling on the side, the metallic gloves will surely fall off her flimsy hands.

I had a MAJOR beef with the chestplate. I realize how different the armor is compared to a more solid PVC figure or perhaps even the DD version of the armor. This one is barely on her chest and only supported by "leather" buckles on the bottom part of the 2 pieces of the front and back torso armor. So if the armor's not on properly, it will dangle like the above picture, giving us a nice view of cleavage.

"Nothing up my sleeve"

And now the gloves are off! Since I said her smiling face doesn't match her armor, I'm going to strip her off her armor one by one :P

This is not a close-up of her armpits, okay? This is to show how the 2 pieces of the torso armor are being held up. There's that leather buckle just underneath her left armpit. I had a hard time trying to put it on properly. Probably why I'm taking her armor off now. The strings on the corset comes off all the time too.

"Miccha dame!"

"Taiho shichauzo!"

Now time to frisk Saber... Err... Just trying to show how her side leg armors are attached. Two buttons keep the corset armor up. Like the picture below.

I love those dangly things that's on her front part of the skirt. That middle part is not even attached to anything. It's held up by the corset & side armor.

Her dress look a bit baggy ^^;

"What smells like boot feet?" - Cookies to who can guess that reference

Her feet are tiny!! No wonder I couldn't stand her up properly. Compare the feet size and the boots! But I guess if they were proper size they won't fit inside.

"Can you velcro the back of my dress?"

Her dress splits open in the back by velcro. Really made it easy to take it off... But I still had to take off her hands from her wrists. Kinda creepy, but it had to be done.

Her underdress. I was posing this as best as I could, but I'm surprised it looked better than what I expected. Very cute Saber ^_^

No... I didn't hit her there ok? That's not a bruise!

Unfortunately since she's always been in the box and she's technically a doll, her neck has been stained by her blue dress.

The back of her neck is also bruis... stained.

She doesn't wear panties... Umm yeah... This white bloomer-like pants is her only lower underwear. This looks a bit strange with this pose when she's smiling like that...

She's not fully detailed, if you catch my drift...

This pair of  panties is actually for her other dress. I put it on her a bit too tight perhaps since she's adjusting it there.

Here she is in that Holiday outfit. Very cute. I had to take off her arms completely off to put on the two piece shirt and blouse.

Cute!

Leaning on the wall.

Her tiny feet and her tiny sandal shoes... I wasn't sure which sandal was right or left since they both look the same...

I love this pose! Even if her feet look really tiny...

Knee pi... Never mind. Knee pits on jointed figures or dolls just don't look right...

Panchira instead?

Frontal panchira!

Hmm... There's still some parts that need to be smoothed out it seems. Maybe I'll sand out that left thigh one day.

She is now in my room sitting on one of my stacks of CDs. I didn't edit this picture much, so you can have fun looking at what's on there and see if you recognize anything :) She looks much cuter in that dress than her armor. At least in this version. I'm kinda glad to get a hold of her, especially as a Saber collector. She'll meet with her onee-chan Rei soon and her imouto later on ;)

An earlier review of Azone 1/6 Hybrid Action Figure Saber is also available on Soth's Blog.

BONUS PICTURES

Inspired by Tony Taka's Saber art.

That's how the lower part of the body look like, okay?? She's not a trap!