flower girl (custom)

 Macross 7 - flower girl

by CM's Corporation 

msrp of ¥600

and released in 2005

Bought this kind of on a whim after watching macross7
The fig is just a cheap trading fig that cost me like $3
but I don't think they ever made any other figures of this character.

She's kind of a mysterious nameless character that has short cameos in every ep and almost never says anything.
http://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm3151531
Tried to do some research to find out what the deal is with the her, but couldn't find anything. 

She doesn't even have a name, she's just called the flower girl.

The colors are really off, and the skirt is for whatever reason mostly transparent, and doesn't match the top half of the dress.

clearly they did a lazy job with this fig, and while I don't think all white necessarily looks bad, it's not accurate to the character, besides, being as cheap as it was I figured this figure would be perfect practice for my first time paining figs, since I plan to do a bit of custom work in the future.

aside from the color problem, Some of the parts wouldn't stay in place very well, especially at the hip joint, where it would easy come apart.  but that's kind of to be expected with figures of this quality.

The legs are kind of wobbly, almost like rubber.

and the stand was just plain out confusing, with no directions on how to put it together. It has multiple arm parts, and two places for poles to be inserted into the stand, but none of the polls seem to be the right length, one of them even has a 90 degree bend in it for some odd reason, ended up using one that's actually taller than the fig itself. 

So I took a trip a michael's hobby store about bought a few supply (also got primer but forgot to put it in the shot.)

I made sure to get some of the colors I'd need for future projects as well, although I forgot a few colors and had to go back another day to get them.

In retrospect I realized I could just make any color using red blue and yellow black and white, but whatever

felt kinda riped off by that bottle of liquid cement, thing was almost empty when I opened it, and it didn't even work for this fig (did work however for the mecha kit I'll talk about another time.)

 used a cord board box in thinking it might help keep the over spray in a confined area when using my airbrush.

while it does work to a small extent, with prolonged painting it doesn't really do jack.

with this fig however, I did most of the painting by brush, and with a sharped toothpick, which was a interesting idea I got over irc from someone and works decently for tiny detailed parts.

This was the end result.

Not have bad for my first time I think.

I must admit I did make a number of mistakes in the process.

for one, the matte paint. that turned out to be a real bad idea.

it didn't coat the figure evenly at all, rather it attached in the form of tiny little drops of the stuff, and was really ugly and bumpy, had to sand that off and repaint a bit.
Even though I mixed in some white with the pink paint I got, I still think it turned out being a bit to dark. (you can compare to the first image in this post)

another mistake was not using primer before painting the skirt which is made of some kind of hard plastic unlike the rest of the fig, the paint really didn't want to stick and kept sliding off.

but eventually got it with enough layers.

I also think I should have glued it together before painting it, becuase the glue kept pulling off some bits of paint.

I also neglected to use tape or anything like that when painting, might have gotten some cleaner lines and saved myself some work if I had done so.