This has been a long while since I have had enough material to make a post. I’ve been slowly progressing with the kit over the past 6 to 7 weeks. I haven’t really had much time to get a good foothold on the project, but this weekend fixed that. I had finished a release at work and the wife was busy with other commitments; which left me to my own devices. And those devices gets the resin sanded and painted.
Here is a quick little catch up from when I first started on the project. I had gotten it pinned and test fitted. Next, I took it apart and did some initial sanding to remove most of the visible nubs, mold lines, and resin boogers. After that initial sanding, the whole kit is dropped into some industrial strength cleaning fluid for at least the night to a few days. This makes sure that any residual mold release is dissolved. The mold release agents are made to keep things from sticking to the resin, and paint is one of those things that the agent will keep from playing nicely.
There’s a rinse and scrub phase after the soak, but I’m entirely too lazy to do, so I have an ultra sonic cleaner that will do the job nicely with plain old tap water. Once that parts are rinsed and run through the cleaner, they’re laid out on a paper towel to dry.
The main parts of the skirt are in three large sections as seen in the above picture. Once dry, they will need to be glued together. I did some pinning between the three parts to add some strength and used CA glue to bond everything. The CA glue works to fill any gaps and with the pins is a pretty strong bond.
Once the CA glue is cured, I can work on making the part look like a single piece as opposed to three sections glued together. Light curing putty is applied along the joint areas. The light curing putty allows for quick putty work. If I need to reapply more putty if the putty doesn’t stick, there are air bubbles in the putty, or I didn’t use enough; I can do this fairly quickly because of the quick cure. I usually apply the putty with the main work lamp off. I have plenty of work time since it cures by light. Once I am satisfied with the putty application, the light is brought down and focused on the putty area. The putty needs about a minute or so for the light to fully penetrate and cure it. Once cured, it will look a little wet or oily. A quick wipe of the paper towel will clean this residue and we’re ready for sanding.
After some quick sanding, another layer is applied then sanded down and this process will repeat until it visually looks decent. This doesn’t end things. Theres the finger nail check of running my fingers across the seams to see if anything catches. Then it is time for the real check; priming the part. Once primed, the small imperfections in the putty work will show up. So the cycle begins of prime, putty, sand, reprime, and repeat. I get the underside of the skirt too since the seam between the three parts is visible on both sides. And no one wants to look up a skirt to see seams right?
The upper torso get some work. I glued the arms into place and puttied over the holes I made for pins. Sand, prime, and done.
There are only three pieces with skin. Her exposed plumber’s crack, her face, and unzipped sexiness that is the sliver of skin from her neck to cleavage to belly button. The primer that checks for fixes is gray, but that won’t work for skin tones since it’ll affect the tone of the flesh. If I was going for a dead girl, then yes, I would paint the skin tones right over the gray, but I’m not; so these three parts are shot with some white base primer. Once that is done, it’s another three layers of skin tones. A dark base layer followed by a very light highlight tone, followed by a middle blending tone to tie everything together.
I need a few more sanding fixes to the middle torso and after a few sessions of putty-sand-prime; the skirt is fully prepped and ready for paint.
I typically paint by layers. The lowest layers get colors first. Then this layer is masked off to prepare for the next layer of paint. For the torso piece, the lowest layer is the zipper. So this was painted with Mr Color Super Stainless Steel.
Once that was cured, I started assembling the cleavage piece with the torso. With this assembled, the lowest layer now, is the skin, but since Volks is so nice to separate the parts, I was able to just glue in the skin piece and mask that whole section. Other kits would have had this torso piece as a single solid part and then the skin would have been the first level with the zipper coming in next. This design saves a masking step. Even just partially painted, the headless, handless, legless stump looks pretty sexy. So this warranted a few more pictures at every so slightly different angles.
And since I had the upper torso assembled, why stop there? The skirt, clear piece, belt and upper skirt along with one leg is assembled for a quick picture. I didn’t glue in the plumber’s crack since I need to paint the main body first. This works for a quick parts test. After all the sanding and priming, it’s good to check that all the parts are still fitting together correctly and there are no unwarranted gaps that will need filling. It also gives a chance to take more visually compelling progress pictures.
Before getting to painting the main body, the zipper and the gloriously exposed flesh is carefully covered in masking tape some liquid mask as a masking catch all, and some parafilm at the neck piece. Now the body is ready for some paint.
The customer had a different paint scheme in mind instead of the original design’s white and gold color scheme. They want to go the dark saber route. So purple it is. I start with wulf blue as a base for some of the folds and darker shaded areas then sprayed ninja purple (these are the actual names on the paint bottles – Finisher’s paints from Japan). The purple was pretty pigment heavy and completely obliterated the base coat. So I used clear black, also from finisher’s, to add shadows and darken the overall purple a bit. I think it looks pretty good so far. The skirt is just about done.
I also got the legs, upper skirt, and her boots painted.
This has been a fairly productive weekend. I hope to keep the pace and get this sucker finished by the end of the September. If not sooner.
