Casting an actress for Batgirl took a while. I wanted someone who's intelligent and athletic with the looks of an all-american girl. Nicole Kidman and Gillian Anderson were my early front runners. While Nicole definitely has the looks, she didn't have the athletic or cognitive capacities I was after. Gillian has the intellect as well as the physical requirements (ever see her do those side kicks on the X-Files ), but age was not on her side. She's older than my vision of Batgirl, but would be perfect for Oracle. I finally settled on Ashley Judd for the role ... yeah, I can already hear the grumblings :-). Ashley is very cerebral, knows kick boxing and has that spunky young all-american girl look I was after.

The figure is a modified FC female body. Her arms were shortened by 1.2 cm and Magic Sculp was added to the inner thigh. I also replaced those nasty looking FC "clawed" hands with fists. The boots and gloves were made from vinyl.

The mask is removable and made from tooldip. It doesn't look bad, but due to the tight fit, it mats her hair down giving her a cowl-head look. I'll have to make a removable wig system (ala Black Canary) or else Ashley will suffer from hat-head syndrome. On a side, I found a new tool to trim the edges of tooldip masks.

This is a disposable cauterizer. Family practioners often use it to alleviate pressure from hematomas underneath nails or seal the capillary beds after removal of a mole or cyst. The advantage of this tool over a saudering iron is that tip is very small with an intense localized heat source. You can actually punch a very precise 1mm hole into ABS plastic without charring or melting the surrounding areas. I wouldn't use it to shave ABS plastic (unless you're working under a fume hood) since the combusion of ABS may release toxic gases. Anyways, back to my point. With the cauterizer, I can cut clean smooth lines such as the eye holes on Batgirl's mask. I can also smooth the edges and trim the ear to a sharp slim shape. This is very useful since tooldip doesn't capture sharp edges very well. In fact the ear of the mask was rather blunt before I cauterized it.