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.