Cloud Strife & Hardy Daytona

Nearly a decade later, I have done it. This kit was in one of my first orders made against e2046 when I first began my journey into resin kits. This was purchased through e2046. I ordered it in 2012, and have just now built it 9 years later. I’m sure anyone reading this may understand as I’m likely not alone when it comes to backlog.

I put this kit off originally due to complexity, and it’s a good thing. Even now after the handful of kits I’ve done and practiced on, this kit was not easy. Cloud was pretty straight-forward, but the hardy daytona had a huge amount of pieces, ended up needing plenty of gluing, resin bending, and general trickery to get it all pieced together.

For goals, this was my first nearly 100% acrylic paint job kit. Recently I painted a beautiful kit of Tifa (the newer Tifa kit I admit looks way better than this older kit, although this older does have that original ps1 nostalgic feel to it) and practiced diving into acrlyic paint more, but mostly for brush work. For this kit, it is essentially all vallejo (some game color, some model air) except the sword was done in Alclad II steel.

Many parts airbrushed, although I did pull out the wet palette and brush to handle details. I found it quite nice being able to go back and forth between airbrush and brush as needed without worrying about lacquer vs acrylic differences. Previously I would use Mr. Color for airbrush and acrylics or enamel for brush (Mr. Color airbrushes well, but doesn’t brush well). It’s also nice not worrying so much about toxicity of paints as much as I have to with Mr. Color. I think I’m officially an acrylic convert!

I think it turned out pretty good. I was actually impressed with the time at the end. Given the complexity of the kit, it actually didn’t take me all that much longer than some of the previous resin kits I’ve done. I must be getting faster. I think the hair paint job could be better – using my black wash (used on a lot of the rest of the kit) over the yellow hair wasn’t a smart move. I spent quite some time trying to add other washes and yellows back in to blend it a little better, but it would’ve been better to use brown wash for sure.

I also spent some time trying to add highlights to the sword. Normally for this sort of thing I would just hit it with a nice shiny Alclad II stainless steel or similar, but I wanted to get a little practice working with metal tones.

Lessons Learned:

• Black wash isn’t for everything. I usually default to a black wash to handle crevices and other lines and details towards the end of a paint job. For gunpla, it’s usually a good choice for panel lines, brings out details nice. However, I think I fallback to it too often for resin figures. In this case, using it on the bike engine was fine. Using it on his shirt was fine. However, I shouldn’t have used it over yellow. I should have used a brown wash.
• Sometimes masking is unnecessary, especially when using acrylics. Many of my previous kits I would spend a lot of time masking, taping, and being super safe to not get overspray when airbrushing. However, I’m starting to get a lot more comfortable not doing this. With a 0.3 or 0.2 mm airbrush and having plenty of practice, I actually find I can control it well enough to mostly limit overspray and paint what I want. After using the airbrush, I can quickly touch up any imperfections with a brush along edges because the acrylics both spray well from airbrush and also brush well. When using Mr. Color, it would’ve been much harder to touch up edges with a brush because they simply didn’t brush as well, couldn’t use a wet palette, etc…Of course, I still paint before gluing when it’s easy and possible and I’m sure I’ll mask in certain cases, but careful control and brush touchups can be a huge time saver and the results come out just fine.