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! ^_^

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!

Happy New Year!

That time of the year again!

WIP: Infect! Part II - Berserker

I've been doing some more work on this monster model: time to start painting Berserker with his clear parts.
At first I was afraid I made him too Hulk-ish, but my customer said he likes him and I'm glad as I really like him too (sort of.. you know, hard to really like this guy!)

However, I soon enough realized that the clear parts were supposed to be painted red... my bad. So today I repainted him:

As a side note, I tried to use the luminous paint I got months ago specifically for this model, but it doesn't glow... this is weird! Maybe it needs to spend more time under the light to get "charged"? I don't know, let's see what happens...

I also finished Chii, but I haven't been able to snap a few decent photos yet (these ones too are so bad because I had to use the flash.. winter sucks for taking photos), so I will try as soon as a sunny day comes out.

More to come - hopefully!