Raven is a
personal favorite of mine. I'd known from the moment I first saw the
Paris Elegance Anastasia that she had some potential as Raven. She had
the gloves, she had a very similar flowing blue dress. The biggest
obstacle seemed to be that she had a full dress while Raven had splits
up both sides, showing off her legs. I wasn't sure how I'd handle this
problem until I noticed that the dress portion of the figure was quite
flexible. It's made of the softer plastic and seemed to be hollow.
I started planning how to transform Anastasia right then.
It didn't take long after that. Using a white-out pen I drew rough lines where I thought the folds of her dress would create a natural looking split. Then, using an exacto knife I sliced through my lines. There was a plastic plug filling in the bottom of the figure, but once I pried that off it was very easy to trim the dress down to look like I wanted it to.
I chose Dazzler's non-animated leg for Raven because I didn't want to waste one of my animated females legs on a project where it would be mostly hidden by a skirt, and because Dazzler's was posed nicely to fit the spot I wanted. In fact, her foot was posed such that I could easily give her the high heel that Raven wears. I cut Dazzler's leg just below the knee because the figures knee joint would have looked to big, bulky and awkward. Instead, I inserted a paperclip into the top of the leg and sculpted the upper half using Sculpey. For the heel, I inserted a paperclip where the heel should be, and then I blended the top into the shoe using plumber's putty.
Even though the leg proved easy to do, I decided against giving Raven both
of her skirt splits. It would be more on-model I suppose but it just
didn't seem necessary -- the one split seemed to achieve the effect that I'd
wanted.
For her hair, I simply trimmed off Anastasia's bun, smoothed it down with sculpey and then sculpted the hair I wanted.
Raven wasn't the happiest of characters during this period of her life (this was before she switched to the white costume), so I didn't want her to have the big grin that Anastasia sported. So I trimmed down her bottom lip and painted Anastasia's teeth red to mimic a bottom lip. Then I sanded down where her first lip had been, as well as filled in a few of the small dimples she had around her mouth, dimples which made her look like she was still happy even though her lips weren't turned up.
Then I painted Raven using acrylic craft paints, and I think Chip helped some with the eyes. Finally, I made Raven's cape from blue cloth, using the one that came with Cloak as a template.
Parts Used:
| Base figure: | Paris Elegance Anastasia |
| Leg: | Toybiz Dazzler (below knee) & Sculpey |
| Spiked Heel: | Paperclip and Plumber's Putty |
| Hair: | Sculpey |
See Also: New Teen Titans