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.

Wip: Eiko Yamato - How to improve and paint clear resin

As you know, I've been spending time and energy on "Infect", Dark Saber and Kuro Sakura. However, there are moments when paints or putty need to dry and I can't do much, so I spend these times prepping or painting stuff I've had around for ages.
This is the case of this Eiko Yamato, which has been sitting on my desk for months, all pinned and primed begging for some attention (you can see her in the background of a lot of my shots).
So I painted her red hair (yes, mine is a red-head) and, since I had some left over skin tone paint from Sakura, she got some of that too:


This is my best pinning job as of today, the parts are actually held together only by pins (first time ever I manage to do that! ^^). Except for her arms, I puttied them to remove the silly bracelets that are supposed to hide the joints.

Today I decided to deal with the skirt of her costume, and to show you how I do it.
When dealing with clear resin, your best friend is Future Floor Finish, an acrylic wax sold everywhere in the world except for my country.



If you happen to live, like myself, in a country where it's not commercialized I strongly advise you to befriend someone abroad who might send you some, or to get some yourself as soon as you go on a trip! ^^
The one in the photo is the US version, the packaging and the name change from country to country. Here you find a lot of info about the product and the names you might have to look for:

http://www.swannysmodels.com/TheCompleteFuture.html

Anyway! At first I wanted to go for a pearly look and so I used some Pearl Ex Powder mixed into some Future. But I didn't like the result, it looked sort of cheap. Unfortunately clear resin, joy and pain, doesn't hold too well to stripping (or at least I couldn't get it as clean as I would have liked). Acetone might work, but it might also cloud up the transparency effect, so I'm not gonna try.
In the end, after some windex-rubbing, sanding and scraping, this is what the 2 parts looked like:



See how opaque and scratched up they are?
The first thing to do is to coat them with some Future straight from the bottle.
In this shot, the left piece has been coated in Future, the right hasn't. Can you see the difference?

In this photo, I coated the right part too. Not perfect, but much, much better!


Next, one drop of clear green in the Future already in my airbrush:

And a couple of coats later, this is the result:

Except for the time wasted stripping the previous pearl paint, it's a very quick process, it only took me 1/2 hour to get this result. This is also how I painted the clear parts on Berserker, except that there was a lot of masking involved so it took a little longer. In that case I used a little more paint to the mix as a totally clear body part is somewhat creepy, isn't it?

I might end up spraying a little thinned down gold to make the effect more interesting, or I might not, I don't know yet.

Now back to work on Saber and Sakura!