From time to time while waiting for acrylic paints to cure, I've been slowly working on a few side projects. Ever since I finished the Dark Knight kitbash, I've been focusing mostly on finishing up the remaining work for those two projects.
Side Project 1: Plamax Minimum Factory - Sheryl Nome
I've randomly came across this kit while I was traveling Japan in 2018. It's a really basic small kit with very few pieces.
Here's another picture to get a good idea on how small it is:
That Ralphs card is about the same size of a credit card.
I've been interested in learning how to paint human figures for quite some time now so I figured this would make a great practice before jumping into resin garage kits.
Oof. Turns out "small" means harder to mask and paint in the details while "less piece" means more masking. I also painted this in acrylic, making the whole masking and detailing process more complicated.
I had some thoughts about using magnets in my builds for some time so I thought it would be fun experimenting with some small magnets in this kit. I got a few 2mm and 3mm diameter magnets and planted them in the kit.
The magnet wasn't going to really hold the pieces in a meaningful way besides for test fitting. In hindsight, I could have planted more than one magnet on each side of the joints to make the magnetic force stronger...
After some intense sessions of adding details, everything was finished.
Side Project 2: Kotobukiya Megami Device - ASRA Ninja
This was a very fun project and was also a huge learning experience too. While the Sheryl figure got me a taste of shading practice of skin and hair, it was really too small to get much meaningful experience. While Megami Device line are quite small too, they were just big enough to get some real practice.
It might be a bit hard to see but I managed to put some lighter tone highlights on the hair in the picture above. I'm quite satisfied with how the hair pieces came out but the skin tone will need some more practice in the future to get the shading really right.
I've also decided to play around more with magnets.
Pictures above are notes I took on where to add magnets. I basically went in and filled every 3mm joints with magnets.
I further put metal etch parts on the finished paint job to indicate where the magnets are planted (also thought it looked cooler this way).
Unfortunately, once again the magnets proved to be too weak to really to hold up the pieces in a meaningful way. I also realized having a single point of magnetic force meant the orientation of the pieces become hard to control. These were all very valuable learning experience for my future magnet shenanigans.
In any case, you can find the full albums for the two side projects here:
