Off the Hook - Octo Expansion Custom Joycons

Hey everyone! It's been a while. I have a lot waiting in the wings; I've just been so busy I haven't had the time to post stuff! Coming up soon I should be able to set those up, so watch out for that.  

So I've been falling in love with Splatoon a lot, and for Octo Expansion I wanted to make some custom joycons to celebrate. I figured, hey, I've got until the end of the summer, probably... There will be a few week's notice, I thought. 

I was wrong. By a lot. Nintendo's got a pretty aggressive Switch lineup for the rest of the year, and that included getting Octo Expansion out as soon as they could, which was: Announced yesterday during E3 and the Splatoon 2 tournament, available TODAY. 

(I was awake much longer than I would have liked last night, trying to finish enough so that I could get these pictures.) 

Anyway, yeah! Despite my sleep deprivation, onto the details.

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Materials: Nintendo Switch Joycons, Adhesion Promoter, Angelus Paint (Metallic, Regular, and Finisher)
Time: ~24 hours
Future additions: Matching Joycon Straps

I was learning about the paint as I went, so it was pretty slow going. Getting the paint to go on without paintbrush marks is a nightmare, and what ate up most of my time. Paint teensy thin layer, sand, dry. Paint teeeeeensy thin layer, sand, dry. Avoid chipping paint. It's a lot. I'm going to get an airbrush if I do more of these. 

These colors are specifically based off of Pearl and Marina's Octo Expansion outfits, with a metallic sheen because I thought it would be fun (and reminiscent of the inkling and octoling's texture, compared to the normal Switch matte). 

Notice the interior shoulder buttons match! Pretty proud of that detail. On the official colored Joycon, the interior shoulder buttons match the exterior shell. There's also a setting inside the tech somewhere that identifies the Joycon as the 'correct' color, so since I made these from gray joycon hardware they show up as that. If I could, I'd change it to the Splatoon colors (pink and green), but I don't know how to do that yet. Maybe I'll figure it out! 

I had taken a joycon apart before, so that part wasn't new. It's a little fiddly, but overall pretty easy if you've ever done much computer hardware work. The difficult part is the exterior tri-screws, since that's a bit of a rare tool head, but everything on the inside is mercifully a regular crosshead. And that all the connections are tiny. But otherwise, it's surprisingly roomy in there compared to some other handheld tech I've seen. 

I debated painting the buttons, but since none of the official joycons did anything with those, I decided to leave them be.

In the bottom middle picture, you can see the color as compared to the official Splatoon joycon colors. 

Like any other joycon, these are capable of fitting into joycon grips, although I forgot to take pictures of that. I say "forgot" because teeeechnically these are not done: while the color is there, I need to let 'em dry a few days and then seal them before I start using them. After these pictures, I immediately deconstructed them so that the paint could dry better, and so that I'll be able to seal them properly in a few days. I'll probably try and finish up the matching straps at the same time. (The straps have no actual electronics in them, which is pretty neat. The Switch has some really smart engineering and design, even without considering the technical aspects.) As I said earlier, I thought I was gonna have a little more heads up than a single day.

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Final notes: I love Pearl and Marina, they are in lesbians together, I cannot be convinced otherwise. 😜 Talk to me about Splatoon headcanons, because I have a bajillion! 

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I am available for commissions! Contact me through dA or at my email address, k.times.two.works@gmail.com, for quotes and other details!