02.05.2005 » Concepts

Appleseed is a manga I hold dear to my heart. After reading Masamune Shirow's first series, Black Magic, Appleseed was the second manga series I collected. I aquired a book 4: issue 1 my senior year of high school and read it so many times, the cover has detached from the binding. Since then I've gotten the rest of the series either in single issues or trade paperback. To this day it remains one of my favorite series. I even prefer it to Shirows Ghost in the Shell.

So back in 2004, I won a model contest at HobbyFan and used part of my winnings (store credit) to get the Deunan Knute figure kit that they had. The pose is from Book 4: Issue 2 as seen below in the scan from my issue. Duenan is about to interrogate the pilot of a landmate who took Hitome hostage during a persuit.

You'll notice that the eyepatch is on the wrong eye in the pics as opposed to the figure. This is because the pages of the manga were reversed (mirrored) for western audiences.

As far as color schemes go, this kit will be painted based on the Appleseed cover art. Nothing custom for this one since I want a good representation of one of my favorite characters. The problem however is that on almost every cover, the armor is a different color. Usually in the brown range which leads me to think it's mostly leather of some sort. There's also metal parts which have been gray or brown in the covers. In the new Appleseed movie, the armor is depicted in reflective bluish metal... so who knows. Most likely, I'll paint it like one of the following covers, but most likely, a combination of all three:

02.06.2005 » Color Scheme

I decided on a color scheme as you can see on the right. I scanned an image from Book 4 Issue 1 and colorized it in Photoshop. I went with a more gray-brown for the fabric parts and a cooler version of that color for the armored parts. I went with a red-orange collar like the cover of 4.1.

02.06.2005 » Hmmm...

Man-o-man... so this is my first resin kit that I've ever tackled. Luckily for me, there's lots of tutorials available online. So far the best I've seen has been at Cody's Coop. Although since I've never worked with the stuff... that's not saying a whole lot. His tutorial is very easy to follow though and I've found most of the tips useful for all aspects/genres of modeling and have learned a great deal from it.

Having read so much about resin from message boards and tutorials, I'm begining to think I got a bad cast. The kit's got a good bit of pinholes and "crevase" areas are very rough. The kit consists of 13 pieces and so far only 2 spots fit together very well. So I'll do a parts breakdown and bitch about each piece...

Head: Not too much to complain about here. The eye is a bit rough and there's a few pinholes in hard to reach spots, but other than that, it's good.

Body: The mid-chest-plate is riddled with pinholes. Blah. I'll have to take some Mr. Surfacer 500 to it and fill them in. Luckily, it's a no-detail area so clean-up shouldn't be too bad. The legs fit "okay" to the body, but there's a little gappiness that needs dealt with. Not sure how I'll fix that yet.

Collar: One of the few parts that fits good. Once I glue it down, it won't need much work at all and will hide that the neck doesn't fit well.

Left Arm (2 parts): The fit at the shoulder has a little more gap than I'd like. It's not "horrible" but a little putty in there would do nothing but help. The elbow however... I'll have to use some milliput and reshape the upper arm portion to fit the elbow. It just doesn't fit well at all and any way I adjust it, there's a huge gap. Other than that, fine.

Right Arm/Knife (3 parts): Same as the left arm, but the elbow is fine. It's the hand joint that'll need putty work here to fix the gaps.

Legs (2 parts): This is where the kit really shows it's flaws. Aside from the legs not fitting into the crotch super-well, the mold on each leg was not even. So basically, I have what at first glance looks like flash, but is really a 1/32"-1/64" offset in the parts. I've worked on the parts a bit so far and they're going to take a lot of work to smooth out. I also don't like how the knee armor flows into the upper pant like it's one continuous piece. I may do some putty/carving there to separate it like in the book covers.

Guns/Pouch (3 parts): Ugh... so for whatever reason, there are huge cut-outs on the sides of the legs where the gun/holsters fit into. The "pants" are even cut so that you'd have a seam here. I'm sure that on the original these fit fine. However on my "wonderful" recast, they really don't. They leave a huge gap all the way around the holster. So what I think I'll do to make this look better is cut out the pant-portions off from around the holsters and reshape them a bit so that I have 2 separate holsters with no connectors to the legs. I'll then fill in the cut-outs on the sides of the legs with Miliput and press the holsters into the wet putty to make a new indent for them to rest into. I'll have to make some connectors as well so that the holsters don't look like they're floating. I'll need to do a similar thing with the pouch that sits on the left rear hip. This will be a good bit of work, but I think it'll look way better when done.

02.06.2005 » Gun Fix

So far I've sanded and filed down the bad parts of the legs where the molds were misaligned. I'll still been to putty those and resand, but first I wanted to get the holster issue out of the way.

I ended up cutting the holsters from the pant parts surrounding it like I mentioned above. After I cut most of the garbage away, I used my scriber, scriber saws, and needle files to reshape the back-sides of the holsters. You can see the progression below. Each holster took about 1/2 hour.

Afterwards, I filled in the gaps on the legs with Miliput and pressed the holsters into it to make new "indentations" for them to rest into. Although I haven't taken pics of that yet, they now have a more natural feel to them. I'm still not sure why it wasn;t sculpted this way from the start, but at least it was easy enough to fix. I'll take pics of that after the Miliput dries.

02.10.2005 » Ready to Prime

Man this kit had a lot to fix. As you can see in the first image, I filled the pinholes with Mr. Surfacer 500. I also filled in the gun holes on the legs with Miliput and reshaped them to fit the newly freed holsters. I had to resculpt some chipped parts on the back (again, the kit came that way) and I had to add Miliput and shape/fill crevases on the left elbow and shoulder. The last two pics show the kit all pinned together. I need to wash it once more, then prime and paint.

02.14.2005 » Painting The Head

Before priming the parts, I gave them a second washing just to make sure I got all of the vasoline off from fixing the gaps. After that I primed all the parts with Mr. Surfacer 500 which was a light gray. I gave all of the parts except for the head, a second coat of primer, but this time it was Duplicolor dark gray primer (available at Walmart). I wanted to leave the head primed with only the lighter primer so I wouldn't have to add tons of coats of paint. The body parts will be dark, so the dark gray primer will help with shading later on.

The head was first painted with my base flesh tone. I airbrushed on a mixture of Tamiya Flesh, Brown, Red and White. I can't be sure exactly what ratios I used, so to duplicate it, you'll have to play around.

After the base coat was on, I added more brown to my base paint and airbrushed in the shadows. I then added some white to a small amount of my base color and airbrushed on the highlights.

The next day after the Tamiya cured a bit, I roughly masked off around the face so that no flesh was showing. I used sticky-tack and Tamiya tape. I covered up bits of the hair, but Masking that would had bee a pain. Instead, later on, I'll go back and handbrush in the hair that I missed. The hair was a mixture of Tamiya Yellow, White, Orange and Brown.

01.30.2007 » Another Blast From the Past

I'm back onto this kit as well after a nearly 2 year hiatus. It's still a typically horrid HobbyFan recast... that hasn't changed one bit. The pinholes are still here, even though much of the rest of the kit has been heavily fixed as stated above. I decided to pull this one back out as a way to practice my oil painting skills on something that I don't care about screwing up. I think that painting this in oils will give the kit that rough gritty painted look reminiscent of the Appleseed Manga coverart by Masamune Shirow.

So far I have the hair done. I started by basecoating the hair in the blonde color seen above. Then over that I applied a thin layer of oils mixed to match that shade. Over that I used white to highlight and the basecoat mix + burnt sienna to shade. After it dried once I went back and deepened the highlights and shadows. I'm very happy with how it's turned out. Tonight I painted the flesh of the face in the same manner as the hair with the same shades and highlights. No pics of the face as I JUST finished it a minute or 2 ago and wanna let it dry before pics so that the glossy sheen disapates. Here's a pic of the hair painting. The "rough" look of the face is actually the resin, not the paint.

02.01.2007 » Face Shading

A few days ago I painted the face the same way I did the hair. Very thin coat of a flesh-tone mix of oils with burnt sienna to shade and white to highlight. The flesh mix was White + Burnt Sienna with a touch of Cadmium Yellow. The pics below have had a satin coat of FFA applied. I needed to clearcoat because I want to use the Windsor Newton masking fluid for Watercolors to mask off the face and hair before painting the "headgear". Satin works great... flat would too, but the satin has a nice sheen to it for this. Gloss would not allow the paint to adhere as well over top. Pics:

02.04.2007 » Battle Armor Completed... sort of

I finished the shading and highlights on Deunan's battle armor. I first sprayed it with Tamiya JGSDF brown for the base coat. Over that I applied a thin payer of oil paint. That mix was burnt umber + white + colbalt blue. Then I used burnt umber for shading and white for highlights. When that initial painting dried, I went back and deepened the highlights and shadows with more burnt umber for shading and white for highlights. Finally a flat-coat was applied. Next up I need to paint the handle of the knive and the guns as well as miscellaneous details such as the eyepatch, eye, parts of the headset, zippers, etc...