Happy 2011!!

Merry Christmas 2010

Merry Christmas to you all!! \(^o^)/

A pig can climb too if he's praised!

Finally an update after all these months.

Meet the Odate Buta from Yattaman

It's a gift for my brother, we loved that show when we were kids - we still do actually!

The palm is scratch-built as the model came with a different kind of pole. Since it was supposed to be a sort of toy palm I figured I didn't have to make it too realistic looking.

It was very fun to make this lil pig, I only wish I had some proper time to work on it and make it better, as in more than a few hours, and to set up a proper photo setting. Not my best work, but one of the most enjoyable. Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

And in its new home, a little dusty from the trip:

Erin O'Malley (formerly known as Eiko Yamato)

I hadn't touched a model since I finished Infect but a few days ago I got a very sad news: an old friend I hadn't seen in almost 20 years is gone. I kept staring into nothing and at  one point I decided I needed to do something not to go crazy. So I finished this one. Painting needs concentration and plus this was a very hard model to pin to the base. By the time I was done the sadness was still all there - I think it will be for a while - but at least I wasn't catatonic-looking any longer. I will miss Emilio for the rest of my life, even though I hadn't seen him in so long.

So, meet my little Irish skater... well, she looks Irish to me at least! ^^

Far for perfect, but she has a special place in my heart.

I realize the shaved ice effect on the blades of her skates is a little excessive, but I couldn't resist the idea.

Comments are welcome! ^^

An easy way to strip paint/primer

I learned this trick from GMobile17 and it has made my life a lot easier!

An easy way to strip off acrylic paint from your resin kits is to use Oxy Clean/Vanish.

Here I'm actually using a cheap brand  from a local discount supermarket and it works just as well, so I guess this stuff is all the same.

To show you how to do it I'll use a 1/8 Cutey Honey based on a design by Sorayama-san. It's a beautiful sculpt, but it's a Thai recast from Hobbywarrior: quite poor and brittle resin. I messed up with it years ago and it's time to give it a good scrub and start over.

So, I add a little less than a scoop of this stuff

in the container where Cutey Honey waits

and I add boiling water from the kettle. If there's the risk of bending resin parts then use hot and not boiling water. However, I find that boiling water works better. Be also careful to use a suitable container for this.

Leave overnight or even 24 hours. If you can, it would also help to freshen the Oxy soup at one point.

This is what your resin should look like with the aid of a toothbrush and some scrubbing.

Ok, I realize now  that this photo is way creepy as it looks like someone chopped up Cutey Honey pretty good!
Anyway, in my case it took some more scrubbing and a little scraping with a knife to get to this point because the chrome paint I used was particularly tough. Results are variable according to the kind of paint you used: I found that the brands I usually use, Americana and Createx, come off the resin completely after this treatment as does my Vallejo primer. This is also an excellent way to clean airbrushes from old paint (it does happen to leave the paint in there, doesn't it? I sometimes forget to clean them! ^_^") and to take off dry color from my mixing jars.

Reorganizing my workstation

Now that "Infect" is done it's time to think about making my workstation more efficient and easy to clean.
This is a very old library that was supposed to go to the dumpster and that my brother salvaged instead to do his own works there. So ruining it has never been an issue really. But the problem is that the old wood got to  a point that it wouldn't come clean anymore, and it would always look dusty and grey from the primer and other crap I use... it really started making me sick!
So I dumped all the stuff I didn't want to throw away in a hot Oxy Clean/Vanish/whatever-brand-is-available bath, which made all my pots and containers encrusted in old paint come back to life as new. Then I got 5 metres of adhesive plastic, the kind that comes in different patterns (I chose a pink marble because it looked fantastic, but I doubt it will stay like that for very long) and covered the surfaces that I usually mess up. I suppose that it will be a little easier to clean now! ^^

On the shelf you can see 3 models I'm almost done with: Eiko/Erin, Elf Princess and Chii (Chii is done, I only need to correct the white line on her cuffs and attach the arms and bow), so hopefully I should be posting these up soon enough.

Infect!

Finally done! Because of all the fit issues, the tons of putty used and the constant going back and forth to patch up problems, I'm not entirely satisfied with the paint job, in particular Sakura's.
But it will have to do. I'm shipping it to my customer in the morning: I took all the possible precautions and I used a lot of sponge to pack it, but I'm still afraid of the conditions it might be in when it arrives.
Fingers crossed!

WIP: Infect! Part IV - Sakura

Another small update: almost there! I finished Sakura, in a few hours, in the morning, I will take off the masking tape hoping that there won't be much to be fixed. The flying ribbons are done too. Her hair bow is still missing but it won't take more than a few minutes to paint that. And the whip thingies. And after that, I will have to assemble the whole thing and try to find a way to secure it enough to let it reach the other side of the country.. that's actually the part that scares me the most.

Here you see Sakura standing:

And here a view of the ensamble:

More tomorrow.

WIP: Infect! Part III

Time to show some progress. Here are a few random shots.

Faces:

The main problem this model presents, other than a freaking amount of parts, is the fit: nothing fits as it should, everything needs heavy modifications!

Here is a shot of the base before said modifications:

                                        

Sakura's stand, modified because otherwise Sakura would be leaning too far back:

The inside of the base also needed some grinding, and later some puttying so that the "lid" could fit on the lower part:

And the clear part too got grounded quite heavily because no amount of heat I was able to produce would bend it  to shape:

Fitting Berserker's hair was a problem as there was too little surface for glue, so I had to go for creative pinning:

Filling the gap between brow and hair:

And Saber and Berseker on the base (never mind the terrible colors, there's only so much a cell phone camera can do):

WIP Eiko Yamato - part II

More than Japanese, she's Irish. More than Eiko, she's Erin...
Photo taken using my cell phone camera, and of course the flash light washed away all my efforts at shading. That's ok, you'll see it in daylight shots I guess!
She's wearing only half of her skirt as that's the only one that would stay on without pins, glue or sticky tack... I didn't want to risk the paint job when all I wanted was to check the general effect.
I like it for once! ^_^