Hallo, all! Long time no talk!
After a few good years floating around the mer community, a few fabric tails, a few partial silicone tails, and about a year's worth of experimentation, I'm preparing to make my first full silicone tail.
I've been playing around with designs for my personal freshwater dream tail, but I have a couple of months to kill before I get started on it in earnest (for reasons that will be detailed in a later tailmaking thread). To that end, and because I LOVE playing with silicone and don't want to stop, I'm going to make a different tail, which, provided I'm happy with the results, will be for sale when finished (I won't sell a garbage tail, so if it turns out I'm garbage at this, I guess I'm out the money for supplies! And that's okay. We all start somewhere).
I don't have a fully realized design right now, but I do have some basic shapes I think I want to achieve, which I've sketched out:
Inspiration drawn from lyretail anthias and similar fish. In terms of color, I'm thinking purples, from a deep royal purple at the base of the body and the tips of the fluke, up into a pale, pearlescent lavender-violet at the waist.
I have a couple of basic scale types I'll be using. I sculpted these ridged ones for my freshwater tail and ran some for a color test:
I'll be using the ridged scales up the sides and around the fins, but I'm in the process of sculpting flat scales to use for most of the tail.
I'm starting the fluke sculpt this week. I'll be using a Finis Shooter in this tail, because it's one of my personal favorite monofins for propulsion and maneuverability. I have a gallon kit of Dragon Skin 10 and enough MoldStar to do another scale mold, but I'm going to have to make a trip to Reynolds for more silicone this week.
I'm stoked to get started in earnest!
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