The Complete BiBi Lineup! [GK]

Hello, everyone!

At last, I've gathered the energy to write a post about the garage kit that completed my trio of Love Live! girls sculpted by French Doll. The display they form is now the centerpiece of my shelves.

It all began by chance. I got into the series and decided to buy something from E2046. Eli was the only one in stock, so I preordered the other girls there as well, then later canceled those preorders and bought only Nico. That same blog post also tells a little of the story of how Maki came to me and compares an original with an E2046 bootleg.

French Doll makes excellent sculpts. Everything about them is wonderful. They are an absolute pleasure to work with. Everything fits beautifully. The detail is simply magnificent. If I'd known in advance, I would have hunted down originals of Nico and Eli too!

The hair needs a little DIY work, but that's nothing new for garage kits in general.

A magnet goes into the head and hat so it can be taken off and put back on neatly :3

The first version of the hair had nice shading, but it was much too dark for Tomato.

Repaint it one more time, and—oh, nailed it! It's just a shame that none of the hair shading is visible in the final version, meh. But the color was too good to give up so easily.)

Maid-café girls are all about masking. Lots of masking. And then even more masking.

But at least you end up with something pretty!

The skirt and bows are their own special kind of perverse pleasure.

Painting the eyes.

Removing the crooked stick.

The hat also appears somewhere around here.

And as the parts are finished, I start assembling them.

I finished her sometime this past summer, so altogether I spent about half a year painting at a relaxed pace, putting her aside and coming back again, because masking like this requires breaks if you don't want to burn out midway through . Then I stalled for several months because of the move and because I was thinking about what sort of base I wanted for all three girls. The idea was to make something like a lit stage. At first, I thought of putting each girl separately on an LED lamp with a diffuser on top, but the lamps I bought for the job were too bright, and the diffuser was too thin to support a heavy figure, so I had to give up on that idea. My husband suggested making one rectangular base for all three and helped me build its frame. Then, whew, I poured three successive layers of jewelry-grade epoxy resin over the whole thing (I used ArtLine on Dina's recommendation), sprinkling glitter between them , and ran an LED strip around the perimeter. Three layers of epoxy turned out to be enough to support the kit's weight on a thick pin, which makes me incredibly happy.

It didn't come out perfect, of course. For some reason I sanded the uneven spots between the layers with a power sander (when the next pour would have leveled everything out—so obvious!), and in a few places I mixed it badly, so the epoxy took a long time to cure. But in the end it still looks more or less decent…and this was my first time crafting a base on anything like this scale. Very interesting

And finally, the girls on the shelf!

It lights up!

It looks especially pretty in complete darkness :3

And now for lots of artsy-ish, New Year's-ish photos of all three together, because they're inseparable now :3

Whew! That was a lot, yes, but at some point I found it hard to stop

And that concludes both the telling and the showing. Thank you all for reading!