The Valkyrie Translucency Test

[drifand]

I'm sure many of us put lots of effort into displaying our valks and showing them off in the best light. I don't often turn on the spot lights but when I do, I notice one thing about my 1/60s that disturbs me. The bright lights literally "shine through" the thin plastics used to make the chestplate. It looks like a dull x-ray with some of the molded undersides showing up as shadowy blobs. I guess why it bothers me is that the toy loses the illusion of being a really solid represenation of my favorite mecha.

This is similar to another post I made on the older boards about the translucency of the VF-11B's heatshield. Bright lights shine thru the thin red plastic and shows thru at the canopy edges as a "thin red line", destroying the illusion of a sealed canopy with a solid shield on top. In the end, I took the heatshield off and coated the inner surface with an opaque black marker. No more eyesore.

For the VF-1J, I decided to do a similar thing for its see-thru chestplate. Unscrewed it and painted the underside with a dark gray Gundam Marker. I didn't want to use black because it might show thru on the front side instead! Anyway, seems to work well. I'm looking at it hold a great pose under the spot lights... and there's no sign of his "undershirt" anymore

Edited August 23, 2003 by drifand

[Commander McBride]

lol, never had that happen with a yammie, but I have had it with other stuff. (Early MG kits). Your solution is the same one I ended up using. Of course, the real solution is to fully paint the figure, no matter what, plastic never looks as good as paint. (One exception: I don't know what they did, but that finish on the HY2M Dom is incredible)