Hello, it’s Sone.

I always start these entries with “Hello,” but greetings you can use as an opening line are surprisingly limited. I’d love to have a few variations ready, but “Yahho!” feels a bit too cheerful, and I’m not classy enough to pull off “Greetings.” If anyone has a good suggestion, please let me know.

Continuing from the previous entry, here’s the second half of the making-of for the small red demon, Taiki. In the first half, I covered the printing of the model; in this part, I’ll walk through assembling, painting, and showcasing the printed model.
As usual, it’s written in diary format.

2025/09/13

I started a print the night before and left the office.
The next morning, I checked the 3D printer app on my phone and confirmed the job had finished. But at this stage, there's no telling whether the print actually succeeded. I’d only find out after arriving at the office. I absolutely did not want this to fail, so I added an absurd amount of support material. The result…

Sorry for the weird camera angle, but—somehow—it succeeded…!

From here, I began removing the print from the build plate, but because I had made the supports way too strong, nothing would come off.
I managed to forcefully rip the model off the supports, but the raft refused to detach from the plate at all, wasting about two hours. Just when I was about to break down mentally, I remembered something Batake-san (Iceberg’s chief) once shared in Slack.

I have no idea why he shared this so early in the morning, but the link said, “Pour hot water over the plate to make removal easier.”
This is it…! I tried it immediately, and the struggle from earlier felt like a lie—everything popped right off. Thank you, Batake-san. Seriously saved my life.

After washing, I cured the parts.

They printed relatively cleanly, but there were already a lot of scratches. Why…?

And when I tried assembling the cured parts, I discovered a horrifying truth.

None of the pieces I split for printing fit together.
The arms, the mask—nothing connected. Even the mask parts in the photo—the upper and lower jaw—didn’t match at all.

To reduce weight and prevent the torso from falling off during printing, I had hollowed it out by splitting it in half. But instead of merely misaligning, it had warped so badly that a huge gap had formed.

I was so shocked I didn’t even take photos.
I had used a significant amount of resin, and there was no time left to reprint everything.

Completely defeated, I prepared the base model for printing and trudged home.

2025/09/14

The only way to fix this would be to file or cut whatever doesn’t fit, and fill the gaps with putty…

So I bought a Tamiya saw and some putty at a hobby shop near my place.
By the way, this hobby shop mainly sells model trains and fighter jets—a wonderfully old-school shop for the Reiwa era.

I arrived at the office with the saw in hand and took out the base print I’d prepared yesterday.

Of course, I removed it from the plate with a hot-water blast. While letting it dry, I lopped off all the pegs I had thoughtfully added. In hindsight, I shouldn’t have added them at all…
It seems the misalignment was caused by the pegs expanding and the holes shrinking due to various factors—something that apparently needs to be accounted for during the print setup.
I cut off any pegs that weren’t absolutely essential and widened the shrunken holes with a drill.

Then I applied putty to the gaps.

My putty work is unbelievably bad. It’s the kind of disaster you’d normally never show in a making-of.
But this is Iceberg—we show everything.

After a chaotic struggle, the assembly was finally complete.

One of the horn tips had snapped off. I must have broken it without noticing. I was so shaken that even the photo is out of focus.

Knowing I would definitely break them again at some point, I printed three extra horns for both the left and right sides.

2025/09/18

I went to Yodobashi Camera near the office and tossed every paint and tool I might possibly need into my basket.
The paint section happened to be next to the kids’ toy area, so passing children looked at me like, “Wow, that guy is buying so much paint… total nerd.”
Do kids today even use the word “otaku”? I feel like it's practically a fossil of a word by now.

I also bought brushes, masking gel, paint thinner for cleaning the airbrush—basically anything that seemed useful.
I wanted to attach the photo of the hilariously long receipt, but I wasn’t sure if posting receipts in places like this is okay, so I’ll refrain.

2025/09/21

Time to begin painting—location: my balcony.
First up was spraying a surfacer to fill small scratches and prep the surface. Once sprayed, the uneven parts stood out clearly, despite having sanded everything once already.

“Is it really okay to continue like this…?”
I was worried enough that I decided to re-sand the whole thing.

After sanding, I sprayed the surfacer again, but I messed up repeatedly—touching it before it dried, having it fall over in the wind, etc.
The entire day ended up being spent just on fixing and preparing the base coat.

2025/09/22

I never expected the base prep to take a full day, but I pulled myself together and finally started painting.
Red for the base, yellow for the nose tip and edges, and brown or black for the recessed areas.

…It kind of looks decent?
I let it dry for a bit.

During the wait, I played ELDEN RING NIGHTREIGN. Here’s the AI summary:

— ELDEN RING NIGHTREIGN is a cooperative survival action game by FromSoftware, a spinoff of ELDEN RING. Players become “Nightwalkers,” surviving for three in-game days before facing the “King of the Night” on the final day. It retains ELDEN RING’s mechanics while emphasizing online co-op and roguelike progression. —

Each run takes about 40 minutes to an hour—perfect for killing time. I’ve played around 250 hours since release.
It’s designed to be replayed endlessly, and although it’s not like every run feels fresh, I find myself launching it whenever I have free time.

After one run, I went back to painting.
But once dry, I noticed some areas where the layering had buried the original red too much. I wondered if I could use a wipe dipped in thinner to remove only the excess.

———It failed.

I didn’t take photos out of shock, but much more paint came off than expected, stripping away the surfacer underneath as well.
Pain. Deep pain.

I had no choice but to repaint the stripped area from scratch.

I didn’t have the heart to boot up NIGHTREIGN again. I just stared blankly at the photo of the first paint pass, thinking, “It looked good back then… it really did…”

In CG work, you can Ctrl+Z, but not with paint.
Every action is reflected exactly as you make it.

Even after repainting, I couldn’t eliminate the unevenness.
Since there was no saving it, I embraced the flaws and started weathering—adding intentional grime.

This is done by applying dark paint with a brush and wiping away everything except the parts you want to keep dirty.

Weathering brought out some depth, but the original color tone was lost, making everything look like a dull brown. Painful.

I let it dry and called it a day.

2025/09/25

Once dry, the overall impression changed again, so I adjusted areas where the unevenness was too strong or where I wanted to restore the original red.
I layered more red over the top and kept correcting endlessly.
Also, I realized I had mistakenly painted the teeth red. “This looks wrong,” I thought, and stripped the paint off just that part.

Somehow, I managed to hide the mistakes from the previous day.
I began to suspect that painting doesn’t require precision or caution as much as sheer perseverance.

With that thought, I packed up early and headed to the airport.

I was flying out to visit the Expo.
I had visited once during the test opening, but this was my first time after it officially opened. The crowds were insane. I knew it was close to closing time, but still, I didn’t expect this many people.

I’d like to write about the Expo impressions too, but this is getting long.
I did at least eat a ridiculously overpriced “inbound bowl.”

2025/09/27

I needed to submit images for the exhibition catalog, so I had asked a photographer friend (an old university junior) to shoot the piece. Today was the shoot—submission was due the next day, so cutting it close.

I forgot to record it, but before this day I had painted the remaining teeth and modified the horns so they could be attached with magnets.
I used neodymium magnets because I always thought the name sounded cool.

The teeth were ridiculously white, but considering drying time and the fact that I was also falling behind on another competition piece, I called the sculpture “finished” at this stage, anticlimactic as it was.

Here are some of the photos from the shoot:

They turned out incredibly cool. It made all the hard work worth it.

2025/10/15

Some days passed, and finally—it was installation day.
I didn’t want to drag a big box through Shibuya, so I had shipped the piece ahead of time. I met up with Batake-san to photograph the exhibition. Thankfully, the sculpture seemed undamaged from shipping.

Assembly took about 30 seconds, so setup ended quickly.
As I watched Batake-san filming the display, I looked around at the other works—and then I noticed something.

…Isn’t mine tiny?

Regardless of quality, the size alone made it completely disappear in the lineup. Zero presence.
People always say, “Big is justice,” and today I deeply felt that “Small is evil.”

If this were client work, I would’ve made a perspective mock-up first to check scale, but because I was thinking only in terms of “the maximum size I can print in one go,” it never even occurred to me to create one. A rookie mistake.

That night was the judging for the grand prize—but of course, I didn’t make it.

The result stung, and the small scale was especially disappointing.
But looking back, I think I was able to push through this project precisely because my focus wasn’t on “making something that looks good in a gallery,” but on “bringing a digital character into reality.”

From start to finish, it was failure after failure,
but creating something driven purely by personal desire felt truly good.

That concludes the second half of the making-of for the small red demon Taiki.
Thank you for reading all the way to the end.

Next time, I’ll cover the making-of for the other piece I submitted to the competition.

See you then!