Productive weekend: Levi Bust completed!

This has been a very productive weekend. Granted I was working on both kits for a while and I did start this kit a while ago and worked on it on and off over the past year, but nothing significant until I moved to the new house. Last week’s post showed some decent progress and during the downtime from the Gusion work, I focused on this, and vice versa. The box art shows the base as done in a single grey color. Almost like a tombstone. I didn’t care for it and thought it would look nicer with the Survey Corps logo painted up. As usual, I always start with the lowest surface level, which was the brick. It was also the largest surface area, so that was painted with a dark red that looked as close to your standard red brick as my colorblind eyes could see. Once that dried, it was masked off and gloss black painted for the emblem proper. Once the black cured, the emblem’s borders were painted with alclad steel.

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New Figure Build: 1/7 Revy by Volks

A few days of rest after AX is always healthy; but I’m still fairly gunplaed out after pushing pretty hard to finish the sucker punch diorama. I’ve still not taken a quick video showing the kit with all it’s lights and morse conversation between the two zeonic suits; but I’ll get around to it soon.

From AX, Volks was in the exhibit hall and while I didn’t really put much faith in seeing resin kits. The booth was fairly simple with some display pieces; and historically, most booths with these figures were not selling kits. I did notice some FSS kits they were selling, all plastic and no resin. But I asked about resin figures and they pointed to a sign right in front of me with their whole line of charagumi kits. Picking up my jaw off the floor, I immediately asked if they had the Revy kit. I’ve been interested in this kit for a while as well as the Saber kit; but I was immediately suckered into picking up the Revy kit. I am usually pretty good at walking away from AX without picking up a single kit; but damn, I could not pass up getting at least one kit from Volks. I hope they did well enough that they come back next year.

Cracking open the kit, the parts separation is amazing. They are using colored resin. There are still gates that need to be removed and mold lines that need sanding. But baring any pinholes, it would be as simple as just clear coating the thing, gluing everything together, and adding the decals. But like the colored bandai kits, I will be priming and painting this kit. It will definitely be an easier resin figure kit; but the same work for any resin kit is needed.

Another note about this kit is the extra parts. The kit comes with two heads, one with her mouth open biting down on a gun mag; then another with her mouth closed. There are also options on her left hand, either holding another gun mag, or holding the second gun. This leads to options for the holsters; an extra empty holster and one that has a gun holstered. Pretty damn cool to include all these extra parts; and effectively, all the parts can be painted and then interchanged.

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Sena Kashiwazaki: Getting her hair did and finishing up the project

This weekend was the build gathering and I actually finished this kit before the build gathering even started. This past couple of weeks, I have been dealing with the issues of the paint chipping on one of the chap parts. I had painted the chap piece along with the other parts and masked as I normally masked and the paint chipped when I started unmasking. I ran the part in a tub of lacquer thinner and placed this tub in the ultrasonic cleaner with water and ran it there; then painted and it chipped again. I then soaked the thing in more degreaser, ran it with the degreaser in the ultrasonic cleaner, and left it soak in the degreaser overnight. Then ran the part in isopropanol alcohol in the ultrasonic cleaner and dried the part. Upon close inspection, I found that the mold release was still on the surface of the kit, so those areas were rigorously sanded and the part re-cleaned in alcohol in the ultrasonic cleaner. Dried completely, then repainted and masked without any issues.

With that done,I finally got the rest of her finished and assembled. One of the major last parts was the hair. Once that was finished, I got to working on the details such as clear glosses, washes, the fingernails, and flat coats. The very last piece was her butterfly hair clip. And with that, she’s done!

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Sena Kashiwazaki: The Painting

I got two more videos in the can now. One for painting the skin tone and the other for just general painting that includes work with metallics and a little discussion on Alclad paints from the regular metallics to their enamel candy line and hot metal red. As usual, I ran into some issues with the paint chipping off the resin. I attribute the issues to improper soaking or cleaning of the resin. I did soak it over night which is my usual time allotment for that process. But the cleaner may need to be changed out; I’ve been using the same tub of purple power for well over 6 years now, possibly longer. I don’t think there is an expiration, but there’s quite a bit of gunk deposited in the liquid. The parts may have just had some super mold release. Who knows. The process is the same, you accept it and continue.

The following process progressed over several days, and in the video, I compress all this into a 25 or so long video. Post production editing is cool yet laborious work.

Painting Anime Skin Video:

The other video as well as a pictorial description of the kit’s progression so far after the jump.

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