This kit is my second resin kit, and this will be my first WIP for a resin kit. This Sephiroth 1/8 kit was purchased from the same place the Cagalli Atha kit was purchased (an eBay seller), and it too is another cheap and lower quality recast of a resin kit. Good for practice, but it’s a pain to work with. However, I just noticed that e2046.com sells a higher quality version of this kit (I’m assuming I purchased a cheaper recast of that kit) that is split into more pieces that seem more defined – I’d suggest buying it there instead for a better kit at only a slightly higher cost.
Warped Parts – Time To Bend
To begin, the kit didn’t even arrive ready to fit together as it should fit together. They had warped, or shrunk, or bent – you get the idea. For example, the bottom part of the jacket is supposed to wrap around the leg. Yet here is our problem – it’s too small to fit the leg inside….
This was an issue all over the kit. The shoulder pieces didn’t fit properly, both parts of the bottom jacket didn’t fit around the legs, and the sword looked somewhat like a rollarcoaster. How do we fix this? Bend it. A little research shows that we can bend resin if we heat it up nice and hot. So, I grabbed my water boiler, put some water in it, heated it up, and dropped the parts in. A couple minutes I pulled them out and….nothing. Hard as a rock. Should I apply more pressure? Maybe I expect too much? A little pressure? NO! It will break. Get it hotter. Got the water boiling. Dropped the parts in. About 5 seconds later they were bending like rubber – seriously.
When bending resin, you WILL know for sure that it’s ready. There will be no question as to whether or not you are applying enough pressure. If it’s hot n ready, you will know. It will probably bend some when you try to pick it up out of the water. It’s quite easy to bend once you heat it up. Boiling hot water does the trick for me.
To bend it, simply pull it out of the water (not with your bare hand of course), bend as necessary – but be quick. I found that it hardened up pretty fast again, within about a minute or so. If I wasn’t done adjusting it, I’d have to drop it in the water for a few seconds again to get it ready to bend again. Once your done and sure it’s ready, put it under some cold water for a few seconds to ensure it won’t budge again – speeds it up slightly, although it hardens pretty quickly on it’s own.
Design Of Kit In General
Besides parts that didn’t fit together, the design of the kit is poor. The kit looks decent enough with details and appears to have potential (with lots of work), but the way it fits together is terrible. Basically there are several sections in which you have to permanently attach parts to some other area BEFORE painting can be done. For example, check out the torso…
Notice that the jacket must be glued onto the torso / around the torso. This leaves a big seamline in the back of the kit that really needs to be fixed with glue and putty. Fixing it with glue and putty requires it to be painted afterwards. I think the best bet will be to paint the torso, put the jacket on, fix the seamline, and then fix the painting on the jacket. Not ideal, but we will see how it works.
A similar issue arises with the bottom half.
Again, we will have to paint the legs, put the jacket on, fix the seam, and then paint the jacket.
The hair is also difficult to work with. There are two small pieces that hang in front. Unfortunately, there is no easy way to attach these to the top of his head. If you look at his head in the above picture, you will find that it’s quite smooth. There are no grooves to insert the little hair pieces into or anything. I had to be very careful gluing the pieces on – glue alone would NOT have been stable enough and they would have fallen off within a day or slightest bump I’m sure. So I built around them using some epoxy putty. This also helped me fix all the gaps that existed between the large hair piece, little hair pieces, and his face. It took quite some work, required me sticking his hair on permanently before being able to paint (painting his face will be difficult considering there is hair hanging in the way), and so on. Extra work, but hopefully it will still turn out ok.
Below is a shot of the three hair pieces before being stuck to his head. You might think that those tiny grooves on the small hair pieces might help you stick it to something (head, other hair, something) – they don’t. Maybe they were supposed to, but the kit is of low quality so nothing fits together right anyways.
Here is a shot afterwards. It’s also after letting it soak in Simple Green to start prepping it for priming and such, which is why you see light green stains. The darker green sections (side of his hair towards face, right in middle of forhead) are putty where I was trying to make it all fit together well.
Painting Begins
At this point, it was about time to start painting. I started with the legs, and needed to get the legs painted before putting on the coat which would then need a fair amount of putty work to fill the gaps. Going for a cold, blue look I mixed up some paint using Mr. Color blue and black. Here is the initial painting with the jacket finally attached, which also demonstrates the huge gap I get to fill (even with bending, this is the closest fit I could get on the jacket).
Let’s get to work….As usual for resin, I used some epoxy putty to start filling it in. At this time, I didn’t have any tools to smooth it out with making the task a bit more difficult, primarily using my finger (I have since bought a tool set which is starting to be more and more useful). The primary issue here was the huge gap at the bottom. I really needed to just fill it in and let the putty harden, and then repeat the process to start smoothing things out. I went back and forth between sanding and adding putty for a few rounds before it started to appear decent and somewhat uniform.
At this point, I also decided that it needed more detail. I started to realize the jacket and lower area was a bit plain and didn’t match up with pictures of Sephiroth elsewhere. It needed buckles. I figured some simple ones would be easy enough for me to tackle to at least give it a bit more detail on the front. Of course, I’m still not that experienced so they aren’t perfect, but I think they help a lot. I ended up just using some putty to form these, but found it a bit difficult due to their small size and surface area. It was hard to get them to stick. Also starting to rough up the paint job…gonna have to fix that.
The head was a bit of a challenge for me. I had already attached the hair (not sure if it would have been better to wait until after doing the jacket top or not), and it ended up being in the way for some of the painting, primarily in the front and later the back of the jacket after puttying it together.
For the skin, I just stuck to the simple solution of using one of the Mr. Color skin tones. I mixed up some brown and red to try and create a leather like effect for the rest.
The eyes ended up being pretty difficult for me and didn’t turn out all that well. They are pretty small and also tucked behing his hair making it difficult to paint. I just gave it my best shot using similar techniques to those used on Cagalli, albeit smaller and colder.
As you can also see, I should have spent more time cleaning up the hair in front as well. It’s pretty rough. However, it’s pretty thin and fragile, and I wasn’t sure of a good way to do it without breaking it further (I already knocked off a piece by accident). I probably could have done a better job looking back, but I suppose I started feeling rushed trying to finish before it gets too cold outside to paint.
When painting the hair, I primarily used white, although I tried a gray undercoat in the creases at first. After a couple rounds, it turned out ok I think. I need more practice.
The armor plating that gets attached and sword were done using Alclad II steel with an Alclad II gloss black base.
At this point it was time to attach the torso to the legs. However, again this fit was pretty rough (I’m not very good at test fitting in advance either). There was a pretty big gap and the jacket didn’t appear as one unit. Furthermore, it wasn’t very stable and needed more support in the gap to even hold it together.
This is just more that needs to be resanded and painted. It wasn’t too bad, since I already planned on puttying and sanding the back of the jacket. Perhaps I should have just not painted the outside of the jacket at all until all putty work was done. However, I was afraid it would be difficult to cover the torso and such, which had to be painted before hand. Having the jacket pre-painted at least allowed me to be a little less careful when painting again at this point, as I only had to cover the areas that got messed up. The gap in the back of the jacket was fairly large and noticeable as well. The primary issue I had with filling it was working underneath the hair. There wasn’t much room for sanding, and the finished result shows that the sanding job isn’t the best.
Attaching the arms and shoulder armor was straight forward. The arms were not a perfect fit but were close from some previous work where I had added some putty to fill them in a bit. However, since the armor covers the connection, a minor gap was fine by me as long as the arm was stable and in place.
The only part left for gluing is the sword, which is difficult again due to small surface area for glue. I managed to use epoxy glue to get the blade connected to the mid point, but the surface area was too limited on the handle to connect it all together. Needed a bit of putty to give me a better surface to glue to.
After that, stuck him on a cheap base I made to avoid falling over, and here are the final photos and finished kit.
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