下手の横好き世界２

Organization

nobody@vox.com(fetjuel) — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 09:42:58 -0700

Today I bought a new hobby case and transferred my old overflowing plastic box of modeling equipment into it. Then I emptied my sad cardboard box of gacha-gachas and trading figures into the newly vacant plastic box.

Model Boxes

Now I have plenty of room for all of my modeling supplies, my small figures are finally somewhat organized by series (the ones I have complete sets of, anyway) and all of the stands and bases are stowed away in their own box. Of course, this doesn't include the ones that are currently on display. All of this organization makes me want to start collecting gacha-gachas again, and really makes me want to get back to modeling.

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Dokusho Suru Rei: Redemption

nobody@vox.com(fetjuel) — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 20:36:20 -0700

Dokusho Suru Rei awaiting color correction

Ayanami's shoes turned out just fine. After a while, I mustered the courage to airbrush her skin. I knew I'd have to do it all at once, and that of all the colors on the kit, it would be the most delicate one to get right. I mixed together the Tamiya flesh color, some Gunze Sangyo clear yellow for transparency, and plenty of white for paleness. The resulting color was a pretty unappealing and inhuman yellow. So I added just a touch of red. The result was this awful orangey mess. I used of all of my white paint trying to lighten it to a usable tint, but the red was just too strong. I gave up and just about declared to myself that I would sell off all my kits and never try building one again.

My good friend Chris convinced me that it wasn't all that bad, and that I should take a break and give it another go some other time. He managed to get me excited about building again, so it was on my mind for a while and today I picked up some nice milky flat white paint from Tamiya and came back to the kit.

This time I mixed the paint very carefully and gradually. Instead of tipping some of the red paint directly out of the pot, I dipped a stirrer in and just used the amount that stuck. The ugly, uneven, orangey red already on Ayanami's arms and legs turned out to get covered up quite nicely by the new pinkish beige color. As it turned out, the new pale color looked great with the old saturated color showing through from underneath. I ended up having to mix in a touch more red to match up the areas that hadn't gotten the ugly color and the areas that had the ugly color showing through.

I did my best to evenly coat all of the skin bits with a consistent color, but it'll be hard to tell until it's all dry and I can look at it in sunlight. A few times during the spraying, after I'd gotten into the groove and was feeling confident about the color, the airbrush did this weird sputtering thing and splashed some big drops of water and paint onto the model. I was able to get most of it smoothed out, but I think I'll soon have an appointment with some very fine sandpaper. :\

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Rei Shoes

nobody@vox.com(fetjuel) — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 20:14:57 -0700

CIMG1628

I masked and sprayed Rei's shoes today. The paint kind of got runny and made some unsightly blobs. Also, a bunch of awful-looking imperfections became much more visible. I hope I can use some really fine sandpaper to clean things up...

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Dokusho Suru Rei: First Blood

nobody@vox.com(fetjuel) — Wed, 06 Sep 2006 20:55:37 -0700

A while back I somehow got into building garage kits. My first one, Goth-Loli Rei by Atomic Bom, turned out all right, but I realized it was actually a recast bootleg kit. I wasn't planning on building any more after her, but I felt guilty for buying a bootleg kit, and ordered a real one as penance. This time it was Dokusho Suru Rei, a kit by New Line. I like to take my time with this kind of thing (it took me about 2 years to build my Sakura Taisen Koubu-Kai plastic model) so she's been in progress since about April.

A lot of the work is pretty much invisible. I spent a long time washing, cutting, filing, sanding, Dremeling, priming, drilling, and pinning the pieces. A ton of effort has to go into making the rough pieces presentable enough for painting and assembly.

Dokusho Suru Rei: First Blood

Getting to the point when I could paint was a long process. I ordered the airbrush, waited for it to arrive, started thinking about air compressors, ended up getting a free compressor from James at work, went paint shopping, ordered some other paints from HLJ, did a ton of research, bought some more paints, bought some thinner and alcohol, bought more paint, finally hooked up the airbrush and practiced. Then tonight I went ahead and put some color on Ayanami. I chose the hair because it would be a single solid color, and I already had some paint that was just about the right color.

It got dark as I was working, so I had to act quickly, and eventually I brought a lamp out to the balcony so that I could continue. The first coat I put on, Hobby Color Aqueous Sky Blue, was actually too dark, and I went over it again with a mixture of Sky Blue and White. It's hard to tell in this photo, and in real life, how the color turned out. I'll have to wait until the sun comes up tomorrow...

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