Android 18

A beautiful Android 18 kit from e2046. A short WIP available as well. My primary goals on this kit were to continue to focus on skin tones since my previous kit I feel like they were lackluster. I also wanted to make sure I did pre-shading and a couple other things I’ve skipped recently.

In general, it’s an easy kit to build and fits together pretty nicely. The bulk of it fit cleanly with almost no work or bending. The problematic pieces were the blue shirt, hair, and sandles (to a minor extent).

For the blue shirt, it’s essentially a tight fitting shirt with a front and back part. Without bending, it doesn’t fit over the chest. I saved this towards the end since I wanted to practice on skin tones anyways – testing on the full upper body was good practice, and if I messed up not a huge deal since most ends up covered anyways except the abs. Once you bend the shirt over the chest, it still took a little bit to try and align the sides to prevent gaps. This would be a little easier pre-painting, but post painting you have to be careful not to get too close with heat or overheat it as it can cause the paint to bubble.

The hair had a couple tricky aspects. Mostly, it’s a little tricky to wiggle into place between the arms and everything, fairly tight fit. Once in place, there was a pretty visible seamline (even after trying to adjust with milliput prior to painting). I did my best and tried to heat and bend it to reduce the gap some after painting, but I really didn’t want to repaint the hair at the end.

On the sandals, the only issue were the straps were a little short I feel like. I probably should’ve extended them a little bit and I think would let the sandals be a bit more naturally flat, but I didn’t. We will just assume the straps are pulling them up a bit.

Lessons Learned:

• Purple top super glue by far better choice. If you read my lessons from last WIP (probably not, I’m probably the only one), you would have seen me give praise to super glue but also complain it was a horrible experience and I almost died. Switching to the purple top bottle which is thicker and not water-like changed everything. It just works. Life is good. I did use the blue top super thin version in a couple minor places on this kit, but very little. Purple top is easy and problem free. Super glue is amazing.
• Super glue not perfect for everything. There are a couple places where you may want to reconsider super glue. If the glue is on a part that is a little tricky to fit and get in the right place, or for pins that are a little tricky to push all the way into hole, use something that works a little slower. With super glue, you have about 5 seconds. For these cases, I changed back to the 2 part epoxy after some of my pins set too fast before I was ready for them to set.
• Hair seamlines are always a challenge. I’m starting to accept that hair seamlines are some of the most problematic and challenging aspects of most resin kits. Nearly every kit has them. You want to paint hair before gluing over face to avoid having to do tons of masking (which we’ve also learned rarely covers everything properly), but if you do this you get seamlines you live with, or you patch in place after the fact. Patching in place is hard, because I’ve also found painting hair that looks nice is also challenging with different layers and tones. I need to work on this more.
• For flesh highlights/shadows, make them more bold than you expect. Others may disagree, but I found on previous kits when I added highlights and shadows, they looked bold when first applied, but after drying and building the finished kit, they were barely visible. I went more bold on them this time around, and I think I like the result better. They seemed super bold when I painted them, but after drying and putting kit all together, they seem much more subtle now.
• Be careful when brushing thinned (airbrush) paint for touch ups – may pull up paint. If you are like me, you may airbrush your paint, do some other work, and later need to touch up a spot after putting pieces together. It can be tempting to use a brush rather than start masking off and try and air brush touch ups in place.  The downside to brushing is the thinner in the paint may make it so the brush pulls up some paint (which airbrushing may avoid). This happened here above the nose when I brushed some flat matte coat to try and de-gloss from eye issue.
• UV gel on eyes is nice, but careful to apply very very small amount. This was my first time using and I thought I was careful, but still applied too much and leaked out of eye sockets. It led me down a path of more issues.