04/23/02-- In actual fact, "Bunny" is just her stage name. She used to go by some eastern European name, maybe Rula Lenska? Svetlana? Ilsa? But that was a long time ago, before the surgery. Darn, ya caught me. This doesn't qualify as a new project: I'm just taking care of unfinished business. I wrote a blurb about this in the "Remarks" section, but figured that it needed more expounding since it's a continuation of the Via Borracho project, this lets me show more pictures of her, and I'm desperate for material (even if it is a little bit redundant). As usual, this installment is a snapshot in the process; a stopping point before the next idea, and she happened to be photographable-- even though she has some rough spots. Hopefully, you'll forgive. To recap the fascinating career of this aspiring B-movie starlet: She began life as Svetlana, a WWII Soviet sniper gal. At that time, she was tall, pale, and had a sweet but hauntingly enigmatic face-- sadly, her body was marred with odd proportioning and bubble-like breasts which interfered with her performance as a sniper. Her first round of surgery resulted in a somewhat drunken facial expression, a shorter, thicker body with heavy, droopy breasts. Her second round of surgery brought her an entirely new face, but this time with a chin dimple and moveable eyeballs. This more pouty and sultry facejob, plus the ability to move her eyeballs resulted in some film work for the internationally reknowned director, Cihan Karadag-- Her most memorable roles being that of a see-thru topped, pistol-packing action gal (Lethal Breasts, Lethal Breasts II), a Halloween vampiress (The Halloween Bunny), and in a weird twist on her Eastern European origins, a future Nazi-ish robot-suited "tank commandant" (Ilsa: Stalag 2525, Ilsa: Stalag 2525 Revisited, Ilsa: Stalag 2525 Revisited Again). As a consequence of the unfortunate typecasting and the fickle public's dwindling interest in large-breasted Nazi commandants in robot suits, her career flatlined. To resuscitate her career, Bunny went under the knife again-- wider hips, thinner waist, heavier thighs, and smaller, more buoyant breasts. She became a regular at the North American Fetish Fairs wearing her chainmail bikini and trussed up, thigh-high boots. As fate would have it, the release of the film, The Lord of the Rings and a renewed national interest in sabre-rattling opened the doors of opportunity. At a recent appearance, she was offered a major role in the film production, The Lord of the Rings of Pleasure. Bunny is excited about this new opportunity; "There is a scene where I am surrounded by many naked, well-equipped men, and I have only this... how you say?...flail-thing. I get very wet just to think about it." From a customizing point-of-view, this has been a satisfying project: she's heavily articulated while not showing much of it and still manages to show quite a bit of flesh without the costuming looking too contrived (I guess that's a matter of opinion)...plus she has a fetishy appeal. Okay, it's not very original... granted. But hey, that's true of almost everything here! This figure is probably the most articulated femfig I've worked on: In addition to the ganged hinges at the knees and elbows, she's got the extra axis of wrist articulation and ball-jointed ankles... plus the moveable eyeballs. This is similar to the articulation features of BBI's Perfect Body/Joanna Dark (Bunny doesn't have the waist articulation and JD doesn't have moveable eyeballs). Despite those similarities, the figures diverge along lofty philosophical lines: JD's focus is the articulation, but Bunny's focus is racked out for titillation. Naked, JD looks functional, but Bunny looks indecent; the doll version of porn. Bunny's torso and hip articulation is designed for appearance. She doesn't have the same range of hip/leg posing range, and a torso twist at the torso/breast joint produces an unstable pose, due to the oval cross-section of her torso. It's a sacrifice I've made time and time again. While the ganged hinges at the elbows and knees are highly desirable for their range of poseability, but there's no way of getting around the fact that they looks like hell, even when they're done well. The side profile view of a bent elbow looks unnatural, like the elbowcap has been sliced off; the knees open up to expose ugly frontal seam-age when bent. You can get used to these things-- the look isn't too bad when the limbs aren't flexed from a frontal view, but the fact is, highly visible multiple seam concentrations are ugly on a scantily clad figure. Until they discover a way to grow self-healing, to-scale skin on dolls, the solution is costuming. Costuming can be used as a tool to moderate the visual impact of articulation. Naturally, it does more than that-- its biggest job is to define the genre of the figure. The condition of the costuming and lesser details further refine the particular character of the figure. My goal is to show off as much flesh as possible (logical, if you put a lot of work into the naked figure) on a highly-articulated figure. Since genre is one of the main things you can manipulate, it makes sense to select one which fits the goal; my choice happens to be fantasy/fetish. No surprise there; it's my favorite genre. In this genre, costuming doesn't have to be practical or fit into some accurate historical context-- it can be evocative of that, but that's not its focal point. The focal point is Sex: ergo, it serves the maximum flesh thing. The chainmail bikini is a bedrock staple of fantasy fetishwear. At Medieval Festivals, they magnetically tug at your eyeballs, in a most lemming-like way; they're a challenge to see what there is to see between the links. As I've mentioned in the "Remarks" entry, this was a first for me-- I'd come close before, but never done this obvious thing. I was thinking that I needed to preserve the special material (chainmail with extra tiny rings) for a future project. Desperation for novelty drove me to use it here, knowing that it wouldn't use up too much of the material. I'll reiterate what a bitch it was to work on this stuff; arrrrrgh... My mind's not spatially compatible with working on arranging complex ring patterns which shift like water as you handle them, so on the bra I took the easy way out and used two triangles of flat material, joined by a straight section along the bottom. It wasn't that easy either. In order to tame the damn stuff, I covered the boobs with Kwik Tack and threaded the outline of the chainmail sections with wire. This made it possible for me to see how the straight piece should be cut, and decide where I was going to put the joining rings. Adding to the difficulty was the fact that the only way to add the joining rings was to do it with a pair of extra thin-nosed tweezers in each hand. Unfortunately for me, one of my tweezers was very flexible, which made it difficult to achieve the twisting force necessary to close the tiny rings once they were in place. The bikini bottom was much easier, since I decided to glue the front and back halves to a leather belt. The bottom area was joined by those little rings, but with only two pieces and a straight join, the job was much easier. One of the unanticipated problems was keeping the back from sliding down her butt-- Because of the old-style hiphugger bikini cut (necessitated by the articulation seam of the legs), the slope of the butt (where the crack starts) was the only thing to hold the bottom up. Dollflesh is hard and gives a slick surface for metal rings to ride upon, so perpetually slipping and sagging were a problem. The rings there were coated with a little bit of glue (dried, and not glued to) to give them some friction. Unfortunately, I messed up the cut on pre-cutting the backside legs cutouts, so some kind of repair is needed there. Seemed like a slam-dunk, but I wish I'd been more careful! In the process of fixing the figure, the torso was shortened a little bit, which made the arms seem too long. (That's the magical ripple effect of working on figures.) Unfortunately, Dragon's removeable hand design really sucks-- the wrist hinge is too high up. I'd originally put in quite an effort in blending the transition from the wrist to the hand where I'd added the extra axis of hand rotation. So hoping to avoid destroying that, my first instinct was to shorten the forearm. But this was already pretty short owing to the long wrist, and I did need to consider the length of the wrist insertion pin. As it was, the forearm length was about right for a "normal" hand, and shortening it would have made it look odd-- we gauge these things by where the seams are, and you can never blend them well enough to escape that subconscious detection. I decided to cut from the hand, resigned to the fact that I'd be undoing my careful blending job. This was a good decision. The shortened hand looked more natural, despite the fact that there was an abrupt transition to the wrist. The original blending job only looked good in one position anyway, due to the oval cross-section of the hand, but this took care of the unnatural length. I'd have preferred to have used Joanna Dark's hands for this (which are the best implementation of this I've seen), but I'm trying to avoid stealing parts in the interest of economy. The result of all this was that I needed to cover the joints with something. Forearm coverings would do that nicely, and take care of quite a few other problem seams in the process-- the elbow (plus solve the problem of the freakish sideview when bent), the high wrist rotation, the wrist hinge and the abrupt hand-to-wrist transition. It also solved another "problem"-- this gave me an opportunity to finally use the tiny eyelets that I'd been hoarding for so long. This is one resource that you feel must be employed appropriately for effect, and I'd decided against using them in a lace-up bustier because that would cover too much flesh. The forearms presented the perfect opportunity. I can live without forearm flesh, and the coverings have a kind of fetishy attraction. This introduced a kind of "unbalance" between the top and the bottom halves of the figure-- the kind that a pair of sandals wouldn't fix. The obvious solution was a pair of black leather boots; thigh-high and lace-up, to match the look of the fetishy arm coverings. I didn't get it right the first time: I made flat-soled boots to fit her feet. The boots needed to be extra loose and baggy to allow extraction of the feet, and something just didn't look right. If the boots were more fitted, it would look better but removal of the feet wouldn't be possible. There was more to this though, the realization of which slowly dawned on me: Thigh-high boots need high heels. It's the law. Sure enough, adapting Ebony's/Jungle Princess's leftover high-heeled shoe-feet forms and covering them in leather fixed the problem. It no longer mattered that the boots were baggy, they had The Shape. Plus they have hard plastic soles, which always improves standing stability. Removing the feet was no longer a problem, since the boot-feet are part of the boots. The original feet are still available in case she ever needs to be bare-footed and naked again. I was a little hesitant to use the eyelets and the high heels-- they seemed to be a terrible anachronism in the primitive genre I've been making figures for. Duuu-uh? That's a pretty dumb concern, considering that I've made a demoness with patent leather high heels and all the women look like they've had breast augmentation surgery. Anachronisms? Who am I kidding? The "Primal World" thing isn't about historical/mythological accuracy-- it's cheesecake fantasy with swords, rigidly adhering to the finest traditional standards of the low-budget B-movie.     BUNNY 2