Maybe some of you know I make models occassionally – they are either kit model of bikes or trikes, or figurines I make from kits. The figurines tend to be rather nubile scantily clad warrior women. Here’s one I’m working on at the moment. I bought this last year and have only just decided to get down to working on her. These are what is known as “Garage Kits” – they are copies of other figurines – broken down into kit form. You can find loads of these being sold on eBay – many come from the far east – Thailand, Malaysia etc – but you can get some from the USA too. They also tend to vary in quality. Some are ok right out of the box and only need a little work to get them looking ok. Others are of lesser quality and need loads of work on them before you can even contemplate assembling them!! I try and steer clear of sellers that peddle lower quality kits – you can find all sorts of nasties lying beneath the surface – bubbles in the resin being the main one, but also ill cast resin resulting in stuff like swords n spears being badly out of true.
This one is about average in quality. The resin is ok but the sword needed reworking. As did parts of the figure, particularly the joints – I had to true those up to get the various parts to fit accurately. I tend to use a resin modeling agent called “Milliput” that consists of 2 ingredients that have to be mixed together, which creates a slow reacting resin mix which will stay malleable and sticky for about 30 mins, and workable up to 2 hours. You can get it in various colours, a grey/green basic resin, a fine white resin and black.
As I said I had to rework the sword – I cut part of it off ( it was too bent to use ) and redid the tip of the sword. I used the part I’d removed to create an extra dagger of my own for the model, making the pommel, hilt and guard out of refuse resin that came with the kit.
The model is ready for sanding work to smooth out imperfections, then she will be painted. I’m going to use this model as a guinea pig, to get more experience using my air brushes.
Here’s another one I started after I had assembled the one above – it’s test assembled, but you can see all the parts that have to be checked and trimmed etc before assembly. This ones a Elf Warrior Queen ……
Something I have to watch with some of these models, they have some very delicate parts in them – but using superglue and Milliput it’s easily fixed. Been working on the Elf Warrior whilst watching World Super Bikes, and managed to complete the assembly in a couple of days, but still needing some finishing off before I start painting:
The shield was a bit fiddly, especially the straps that hold it in position, and one of the dagger handles broke off so I had to repair it – air was a little blue after nearly a dozen attempts to sort them!!!!! But got there eventually after I had walked away from it n had a cuppa, then tried again, and again
She isn’t exactly as per photo, I left off the breast plates and I added more hair to her forehead area because it looked rather strange without a little straying over it – the Milliput makes doing stuff like that easy. She’s almost ready for paint……
I’ve got a set of air brushes to do that with, but the last one or two I hand painted. I’ll try n get a photo or two of one of them to show you. I’m gonna break out the air brushes on these two though, brush up on my technique so to speak (no pun intended ) I have 3 different ones, and a connection hub that allows me to have all 3 connected to the small compressor I use at the same time, so I can swap from to another easily. I also have a small turntable to put the models on facilitating working on them easier.
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