When I first saw Art Attack's figure kit Art Girl, I immediately envisioned building a diorama around it. With the holidays close at hand, I had planned to purchase it for myself once the holiday season, and spending, was over. Instead, my loving wife thoughtfully surprised me with it for Christmas that year.

This 1/12 scale resin figure kit is nicely detailed and well sculpted with solid anatomy. The casting is free of air bubbles, with only the seams on the shoes and inner thighs requiring any real effort to clean up. The kit includes a display stand, which I discarded, and a cast paint brush, which I used elsewhere in my diorama, replacing the one in Art Girl's hand with a new one made from a real brush cut down to size. I was using a lot of wood in the diorama, and I wanted her palette to match. Using my Dremel™, I replaced her cast resin palette with one made of balsa wood, stained and smeared with acrylics.

An unfinished wood plaque planked with balsa wood strips would serve as the paint spattered floor of the naked artist's studio. An easel and taboret were scratch built from balsa wood as well, then stained, weathered, and cemented in place. With the studio finished, I proceeded to clutter her work area, combining scratch built items with modified doll house miniatures to create various artist's materials. An applicator handle was added to a mayonnaise jar, turning it into a bottle of rubber cement. Cast lead doll house toothpaste tubes became tubes of paint, with squeezed areas ground out with my Dremel™. Glass doll house canisters were filled with tooth pick pencils and old paint brushes cut down to size. The hardest miniature to locate in the correct scale was her coffee cup. We found tiny display sets in a doll house shop while my wife and I were vacationing in Put-In-Bay. I filled the cup with paint and glue "coffee", then added a lipstick smear with paint. Using our Mac, I created dozens of labels for bottles, cans, and paint tubes, as well as her pile of artwork, sketches, and the cover of her sketch pad. I cemented the sketch pad cover to a pad of glued paper and cardboard, frayed the edges on one side with the Dremel™, then inserted a spring to simulate the spiral binding.

One might ask the question "Why is this artist working naked?" I decided that the logical reason for this was that she was painting a nude self portrait. To facilitate this, I hung a mirror scratch built from styrene and Bare Metal Foil atop her easel. For her painting, I photographed my wife posing nude, then modified the image with brush effects in Adobe Photoshop. The image was printed on decal paper, then adhered to canvas stretched over a balsa wood frame.

The end result was a beautiful figure kit incorporated into an unusual, light hearted diorama. It's always fun to watch people, glancing back and forth from Art Girl's painting to my wife, slowly figuring it out.

Volks 1/4 scale resin rendition of artist Hajime Sorayama's Blind Beauty is so nicely detailed there isn't much need for improvement. When I purchased this big figure kit at a convention, I began carefully planning slight changes to the original kit.

First to go was the sagging inseam of the M.C. Hammer pants the tall, curvy submissive was wearing. Armed with my Dremel™, I ground away the inseam that dangled near her knees, replacing it with a hemline for a skirt made of very thin sheet styrene, carefully molding the seams into the wrinkles of her former britches with putty. This done, I added a chastity belt to the heart shaped opening of her new skirt, giving reason for the gathering of fabric beneath her bare cheeks. Many of hours were spent wet sanding and polishing her skirt to a high fetish shine. The high gloss finish of her skirt was a stark contrast to the dull finish of her exposed bottom, carefully crisscrossed with airbrushed lashes.

Next to go was Blind Beauty's freedom. I shackled her wrists and ankles with cuffs made of styrene strips and luggage strap buckles, then tethered them all together with necklace chain and padlock charms. The keys to her shackles were glued near her feet on the display base, marbled with a craft spray paint kit.

With forethought, planning, and a little effort, even a figure kit like Blind Beauty can be given some individual touches by the modeler. Truthfully, the hardest part of this modeling endeavor fell upon my wife. She had to explain the presence of this high fetish kit when her mother noticed it in the display cabinet.