Welcome to the Madness

Usually I just throw up my art or the pictures I take of my nendos with a short blurb. This project, however, I felt deserved to have a little more context and I thought people might like to see what went into making the end result.

I had the idea to do Duetto customs of the Stammi Victor outfit ever since I started collecting the YOI nendos. I had painted my Yuuri a while ago, but finally got around to finishing Victor after I got the idea to do this project for a digital Christmas card exchange.

Yuuri took me approximately between 4-5 hours when I painted him. Because it’s been cold here recently, Victor took about 7 hours since I needed to wait longer between coats to dry. In retrospect, I wish I would have painted them at the same time. 

I was really happy to find a toy hockey play set that had nice sized boards that I could use for my project. They come as solid white pieces, so I taped them off to paint the bottom and top parts a dark blue. This took a while, again because of waiting for paint to dry. I ended up not liking the tops being painted, so I scrapped that and returned them back to white.

I searched through screenshots from episodes 11 and 12 looking for the board ads that I wanted to recreate and also for the on ice logos. ISO is the skating organization replacement for the real world ISU in YOI, a detail I hadn’t really paid attention to in my several watch throughs before doing this. I used Krita (the program I use to do all of my digital art) to draw out the designs and got a little bit of help from my significant other with the fonts since Krita’s text tool admittedly sucks. I don’t currently have a printer, so all of this and the backdrop were all sent to Office Depot to be printed. I got an interesting call at 9AM the next morning after placing the order online for pickup from the confused print department about the backdrop. (Yes, it was supposed to look like that.)

My board ads are attached with double sided tape and the on ice logos were tacked down to a foam core board. I used parchment paper to cover the logos and give them that below the ice look. All of that was then covered by a clear vinyl desk blotter. I’m really happy with the glossy surface and reflections that the vinyl provides.

The inside on ice dimensions are 18″x26″. Here is a Yuuri for scale. >.<

Sometimes you have to improvise light holders. 

All lighting was done practically with these RGB LED puck lights and the spot light was my significant other holding an LED flashlight at my nendos while I took pictures.