A Tale of Silver Wolf, the Silver-Sided Wolf!

Hi everyone!

Today I'll tell you about last year's long-running project. I wanted to write about finishing it before New Year's... then I wanted to finish it during the holiday week, then January ended... and, well, I finally conquered this project by my birthday!

So, Silver Wolf! This is the first 3D-printed figure I've properly finished. Sometime last summer, a resin printer appeared in our home and we started trying to print assorted anime figures. The models were practically random and badly sliced, and we didn't know how to do anything ourselves; the resin was too brittle, the layer lines were too obvious, and there were all the other delights of 3D printing I'd imagined. But as we gained experience and upgraded the hardware and resin, something beautiful and inspiring to paint began to emerge. And so, in October, Wolfie was printed.

The model is very ambitious. There was an option with a simpler base, but who ever takes the easy way out?

I usually take photos of where it all begins, but this time there was absolutely nothing on my phone... not even the start of the process

I briskly airbrushed the hair, body, jacket, and boots, and then the masking sessions began. I think I've grown to love this, because you peel it off and everything underneath is so smooth and beautiful that the hours spent painstakingly sticking down bits of tape and little circles pay off handsomely

Have some more masking!

This was also the first model on which I tried Silver Chrome. Pretty stuff!

At this point New Year's arrives, and I keep painting furiously while away from home , hoping to finish in a week even though the base hasn't been printed yet.

And in that week I finish painting the body and the spaceship.

I assemble it and think, “Well, all that's left is the base. That shouldn't be difficult!”

(Wolfie's glasses are still opaque here; later I printed and painted a transparent version.)

Then I start printing the base, the film on the vat tears, resin floods the screen, and work grinds to a halt for a week while we wait for the new Elegoo Saturn 3 Ultra to arrive (well, it really is several times better than its dearly departed predecessor, the Elegoo Mars Pro). Once it arrives, we pour a bottle of clear resin into the new printer and everything prints amazingly, except... it's mirrored!

And somehow we missed the elephant sitting right there in the settings

Well then. The settings are fixed, Eryone Crystal Series Purple transparent resin arrives, we pour it in, print... hmm. Strange color. It does look pretty with light shining through it, but, uh, no, this won't do.

We mix it half and half with the remaining Anycubic Clear ABS-Like—better!

By printing with slightly different ratios (the purple bottle is running out...), we get a decent result that only needs a little tinting with clear blue.

About the disc. It came out with this annoying line, which I honestly couldn't be bothered to fix, and after three attempts I didn't want to print it again either. A sticker was the solution! I bought a sticker pack on Ozon, picked the right one, and buried the whole thing under a thick layer of Mr. Hobby topcoat—and voilà! Except I messed up the sticker placement, but oh well.

I begin the careful assembly of this enormous beast:

Before permanently driving a stake into Wolfie's back, I photograph what will be almost entirely hidden from view on the shelf...

Phew, she's done! She's absolutely huge!

And here's how much of the base was rejected over the course of printing:

But all that is behind us now, and we can look at some pretty photos of Wolfie :3

And that's how my little silver-sided Silver Wolf turned out. There's no question I could have done better, and I can see where, but overall I'm more pleased with the result than not :)

Also, I didn't include this in the previous post, so I'll report last year's results here: only five kits painted, probably my least productive year ever in terms of painting... I hope to do better this year!

(Or perhaps I can count Wolf toward last year, since I did manage to finish her by Lunar New Year )

Thank you all for reading!

P.S. Wolfie is looking for a home!

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