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Somewhat exhausted from building my Eva diorama I sought to build one of the many primed kits in the interim for a change of taste, and this seemed to be the least stressful one so I picked it. But what can I say, I still marvel at the engineering of this kit and the sheer insanity of having sweat shop workers mass-produce it as prepaints! Sculpted by F-Face’s Asai-san, the prepainted version of this small figure is included as a special present for Gainax’s limited edition Nadia DVD box. As a garage kit without instructions and blurry reference picture however, it takes quite a bit of trial and error to just put it together. More in the kit review. While Nadia is very nicely depicted in this sculpture and King is cute, what impressed me most about this kit are the details. The frame Nadia is sitting on is probably part of an experimental aircraft that Jean was building (haven’t seen Nadia yet so they’re all random guesses). The seat and wood all have fine textures, and the frame is a very three dimensional structure supported by many pieces. The whole composition is just pleasant to look at. A nice excursion from the huge amount of stand-there-looking-pretty GKs prevalent nowadays.
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| Seam lines: 3/5 Pinholes: 4/5 Casting: 2/5 Fit:2/5 Part Break: 5/5 Help As I mentioned above the kit is a bit hard to work with without instructions or clear reference pictures. Nadia is obviously a no-brainer, but the frame is somewhat cryptic. Like all well-engineered kits, the junction between pieces are teethed to interlock uniquely so that you aren’t supposed to make mistakes. Unfortunately a few pieces are badly molded so the interlocking doesn’t quite work, and some teeth are missing. After a lot of guesswork and reshaping the thing was finally in one piece. The next problem is to secure the frame. Since the kit is very small, the pieces are not exactly easy to pin, for instance the support lyre-like beams supports the seat and the whole Nadia figure, but its very thin so the contact with stuff below are not secure without pinning. One weakness with the sculpt is the bareness of the back. Granted it’s probably not something you’d be interested in because Nadia is hidden when viewed from the back, still I wish there were some details there. And no I’m not gonna increase my modeling angst by suggesting I put in the details myself, though the thought did cross my mind 🙂
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| I’m probably gonna get bashed by a.r. people for the skintone just because every Nadia illustration has different color, so everyone’s idea of how she looks is not the same either. In the show she’s very dark, almost chooclate at times, but in Sadamoto-san’s (Gainax character designer) paintings she’s more like tanned-dark. Some even have her in normal anime skin color. I tend to go with Sadamoto-san’s interpretation, with more red than blue in the mix so that she’s more vibrant. And the hair was again done with pearl, but this time I dulled it a whole lot with misted basecoats and flat coated it, and the color still shows through, albeit with a much more subtle effect, which I like better than most ofmy previous applications of this method. This time I tried using Alclad II Lacquer’s chrome for the metal frames with very pleasing results. On smooth areas you can actually see some of your own reflections. I didn’t really follow the instruction of using a black enamel primer but rather went with Gunze’s gloss black, but it still works amazingly well. The paint is very resilient so you can mask over it and won’t marr the surfaces by simple handling, unlike Mr. Metal Color. However it still doesn’t take rough handling very well, I managed to rub off quite a bit by constantly test fitting during final assembly, and had to reapply. I also tried Liquid Leaf for gold and I think it’s one of the best gold paints I’ve come across. It’s got very fine metal pigments so the gold looks very smooth, almost mirror-like, although not as much as the Alclad’s Chrome. The color is also close to real gold as the metal are suspended in a yellow-tinted solution. I’ve only hand brushed this paint so I’m not sure how it comes off airbrushes, but it’ll probably be nice as well.
Finally the kit didn’t come with any decals so I had to improvise again. Thanks to the web I was able to dig up a bunch of aircraft blueprints. The engineering drawings only improve the sophisticated look of the kit… now back to my Eva diorama ^_^;; |
Her Skin tone color is perfect .