SteveTheFish

My friend in America 3D printed this small figure of Minmay. She wears a dress like this in the manga, Macross: The First. Today after work I primed her with Gaia Notes Surfacer Evo Flesh. There are four parts: head, torso, waist down, and a stand. I really wish her waist/hips was a separate piece from her dress because I won't be able to paint up to the top. It's not like anyone can see up there, but since I'm OCD I can't stop thinking of this. She's pretty much nopan too. He printed her in dark blue resin, and this surfacer did a great job in covering that up. Next I'll paint her dress red. Dunno how well I can try painting her eyes at this small scale, though.

I got out my 550 scale Gundam Dendrobium model a few nights ago. I built this kit nearly 20 years ago (mostly unpainted), and I wanna give it another shot. But this time I want to light the engines. I'm slowly strategizing how I can go about doing this.

The V-Color paints are optimal for sofubi kits. While you can prime them and paint them with lacquers and acrylics, the V-Color paints are so extremely durable and it's almost like it dyes the vinyl rather than merely applying a layer of paint. You can't scratch it off with your fingernail. Only if you use sandpaper could you damage the paint job it's that amazing. The downside is that these paints can be a bit difficult to use. If they aren't thinned enough with the V-Color vinyl thinner, it sprays cobwebs. As for other stuff, that is a good question. I have seen it used on spongy material in a YT video. This guy was building an old Votoms kit and making a diorama that looks just like the box art. He used a clear orange V-Color paint on some sort of soft material to make an explosion. It might work on a polycap, but it might fall off too. It usually adheres to putty used to fill seamlines. That's all I have personal experience with. It doesn't like primered vinyl though.

Is anyone here a fan of Record of Lodoss War? I'm currently working on a 1:6 scale Deedlit sofubi by Kaiyodo. I'm painting her with V-Color vinyl paints. So far she is turning out great. Someone told me the colors are perfect for Dungeons and Dragons, which Lodoss is based off of.

I've heard that as well. I do not care for transforming models. In high school in the early '90s, I built the old Imai transforming Valk (repopped by Bandai), the one with the nose you must replace between transformations. Fiddly bits broke on the landing gear areas. Bandai's Methuss from Z Gundam is one of my favorites, but that transformable kit doesn't really transform well and the parts don't fit properly in jet form. I'd rather have a kit in a solid form than a transformable one that doesn't behave properly.

I changed the color of the sensor lens on the Scout Regult from blue to red. Looks nicer. The Missile Regult was finished last fall, but I realized that the upper legs were on backwards, so I had to take the legs apart and switch the parts. I think the Scout is pretty much done. I'm not quite done yet with the Bandai/Imai Q-Rau. Actually I painted the eye area the same gray/white since taking this picture. I had taken a mold of the eye, drilled out the lens area, put the mold back on and backfilled it with clear, UV resin and painted it red. I'll see about taking a close-up pic later. I had articulated the hips with ball joints to have the mecha pose more naturally. As for the Millia Armored Valk, the head, shoulders, waist, and hips are ball joints. Unfortunately, the shoulder ball joints stick out to far. Be honest: it looks weird, right? I'm thinking I might try to pop the ball joints out of the sockets, perhaps cut off the plastic from the ball joints and replace it with metal, and try over. What do you think? Other than that, it has turned out nicely. The Yellow Submarine hands look so much nicer than the hamfists the kit came with. I used the leftover paint mix from the Hasegawa version for the armor color. The only surviving decal I used from the Imai kit was the hammer/torch insignia that goes on the pelvis. The rest were unusable and discarded. The 1:72 Hasegawa kit comes with many unused decals which is quite fortuitous, since they are smaller and in-scale with the 1:100 Imai kit. The VF on the left leg, the Ichijou vernier decals, the ground UN Spacy logo, the 303 decal, and the decals on the tops of the hips are all extras from the Hasegawa kit. It's like Hasegawa had people like me in mind and threw us a bone with all the leftover decals. The rest are generic, random aftermarket science fictiony decals and the UN Spacy logo for the sides of the waist (close to the cockpit on the sides) and on the top left wing are aftermarket decals from eBay/China. The same for the "UN SPACY" lettering on the bottom of the right leg. Panel lining was done with a Gundam Real Touch Marker dark gray (practically black). I want to do a little bit of weathering on these before I consider them complete. Advice on what to do with the silly-looking arm joints would be appreciated.

Thanks! I can't do justice to Sadamoto's signature eye style, but it's passable. I see some people who can pull off gradations and I could do that just a bit, but I cannot do the seamless blending that some can. The thing about doing figure garage kits is that it doesn't matter how well you did painting a figure if you screw the eyes up. If the eyes look like crap, the whole figure is gonna look bad. There is one guy who does a lot of Macross builds online and he did a Rei figure that just looked awful. I won't mention names, but he attempted to do something with her eyes that really should not have been bothered with because the shape of the figure did not match what he had in mind. The figure ended up looking disturbingly alien or something.

Last night I finally finished my Asuka resin kit from E2046. It did not come with eye decals, so I hand-painted them. Oops, I didn't notice that tiny hair speck on her arm. I just wiped it off.

My friend from America came to visit Japan for a couple of weeks, and we spent a weekend together at the start of Golden Week. We scoured the various Book Off, Hard Off, Hobby Off, Surugaya, and Mandai Shoten locations in Gunma and Tochigi Prefectures. I bought a Y-Wing sofubi kit by Argo Nauts at a Book Off Plus in Maebashi. It is mostly vinyl, but also has brass, pewter, and resin parts. Here is a quick dry fit of what it looks like so far. I didn't tape the pieces together or anything, but just quickly assembled it for this picture. I have not yet begun to bend copper wires to put on the ship for its piping. The kit does not come with any decals, so I gave it my own, unique paint scheme. The main body is vinyl, the tail ends of the nacelles are resin, the nacelle beams are brass, and the guns and landing gears are pewter (I think). I painted the vinyl parts with V-Color paints, which are made specifically for painting sofubi kits and toys. I first mixed Light Gray in with Black to make my own German Gray color which I used as an undercoat. I splotched Mr. Masking Neo in areas with a sponge for paint chipping, then went over it with Light Gray. I used Blue and Pastel Blue for the trim, and Orange Yellow to have one panel be a replacement. For the non-sofubi parts, I used Mr. Color 325 (JASDF Gray, IIRC) which is a good match for the V-Color Light Gray. Since it is a sofubi kit, I will have to use an acrylic wash rather than enamel because enamel paints and thinners react badly to vinyl. This reminds me... I have a Macross Valkyrie sofubi kit by Kaiyodo I bought a few years ago. I'd first need to cast one of the arms though, since that part is missing. Fortunately, the seller on YAJ gave me a partial refund after I realized it was missing the piece and both arms are identical to each other anyway. EDIT: I just realized that I had hastily attached the nacelles upside-down. I just threw this quickly together to take a photo before I left for work this morning.

This is just strange because Max Factory gets its name from Max Watanabe. I assume he will no longer have any work done for Max Factory. It's just strange because he had his own brand going and now he's the CEO of Wave.

Got mine today at the Bunshindo bookstore in town.

Their website is still offline... https://www.fujimimokei.com/

Thanks! Nadia is my most recent work. There are different bead makers: Perler in the US, Hama in the UK, Nabbi in... Denmark or somewhere, and lately I've learned of Artkal in China. Hama kind of complements Perler because they offer different shades of color that Perler does not, but I don't like how glossy their beads are after melting them. Artkal has the best range of colors, and I've only recently learned about them. Artkal has the yellow/brown colors I needed to make Nadia.

One of my hobbies is making iron beads from pixels taken from 16-bit video games. Since there was an abundance of anime-related video games. When we were still living in America, I found packages of Perler Iron Beads at a craft store and I thought, "I could totally make pixel art from retro video games with these!" Before I knew it, I'd stumbled upon a hobby popular online. You just take game screenshots, enlarge them, and replicate them pixel by pixel from the screen to the beads. It's meticulous, but not tedious. It's fun. Since this is a Macross forum, I'll start with these from the game Macross: Scrambled Valkyrie on the Super Famicom. Lum from the Urusei Yatsura game on the Mega CD. She is particularly tall. Nadia from the PC Engine game. There are also Nano Beads, which are 1/4th the size of regular iron beads. These can sometimes be frustrating because a slight bump can send them all flying because they are so small. Here is Devil Hunter Yohko from the PC Engine game. This one was very big as the sprite took up the entire screen in the game. It would not have been feasible to make this with regular iron beads. Rei from Evangelion, done in Nano Beads. I just found pixel art of her on Pinterest and used it to recreate her.

Fujimi won't have a booth at the Shizuoka Hobby Show. They will have a booth at Wonder Festival in July. Possibly the Ani-Chara event this summer too, but I am not sure.