Eureka Yurika!

Introduction

It’s summer time! In a light sea breeze, Yurika brushes her soft blue hair, ready for some water action. But the sun is so bright, even our lightly tanned heroin has to dodge its radiance.

Yes it’s poor attempt at poetic writing 🙂

Yurika movie version, the first in a series of great kits by Keiko, is a mixture of good anatomy and cute anime face! For this kit I applied a slightly tanned skintone for our healthy heroin; indeed, the plumpiness of the figure is a trademark of later Keiko girls. I was also very inspired by Neko Playground-san’s Yurika, which sans a few problems is amazing. I worked out a transparently laced bikini for her – I want it to remain a bikini since Yurika is clearly dodging the sun, so a lingerie outfit doesn’t quite make sense.

Seam lines: 4/5   Pinholes: 5/5   Casting: 5/5   Fit: 4/5   Part Break: 5/5   Help

Amazing kit… on a first glance. I can’t really count any pinholes, and the part break is very ingenious. Her left and right shoulders and separated from the bikini, so painting the bikini is pretty easy; and the shoulders are joined at the back with a seam line. But the seam line is hidden by the hair, so theoretically no puttying is needed, very neat. The left and right legs are also separated at the obvious bikini line. That said, I wouldn’t recommend this as a beginner’s kit either. It has flash on top of thighs, which if you don’t remove carefully, will cause unsightly gaps. And most of the build up I’ve seen have visible gaps between the leg and the bikini (including the sample buildup on the box!), probably because the gaps are very small, so unless you putty after you glue the legs (which is what I did), they’re hard to remove. I also wrote in my news page about the perfect fit of the kit, but the shoulders don’t snap in that perfectly.

Spending time to test fit the shoulder will avoid a lot of problems… I didn’t do it thoroughly, so I suffered. My left shoulder didn’t fit perfectly and I needed to heat it to get it to conform, but after doing that, I think it conflicts with the right shoulder, which I only discovered during the final assembly, as seen on the right. Imagime undoing the area, reprime and repaint…. argh.

I went all out for her. The best thing I think I did wasn’t the lace though, it’s the hair. She’s kind of lifting her hair like a shampoo commercial, but the sculpt the of hair is very rough, and I had a hard time making out what she’s doing when I first saw her, and that makes the kit somehow unnaturally posed. However after adding the hair strands and locked her fingers into them, there’s really no doubt.

The decaled laces were a bitch to install, I didn’t measure the areas and then cut to fit, instead I printed out a full mosaic of patterns, and then mask the skin and apply the decals, then trim. Of course, I cut the decal sheet up and glue segments on, otherwise the decals will not level on her prisms 🙂 I also don’t want her nips to show – after doing a lot of not-so-subtle kits I appreciate the fact that modesty is more titillating.

The base I made with a different approach than Shiori’s with mixed success. I took a wooden base instead of a picture frame, and carve out the center (tedious with my minimite…), and then use celluclay to make out the relief, topped with sand. The sawdust I got from dremeling also double as finer sand, so that’s cool. Sculpted a few pieces of shells and what-nots with Magic Sculp and laid a final cover of elmer glue and the base was ready for painting. The edges were masked beforehand, but after baking the base (to make the celluclay dry faster), the tapes were much stickier and lifting them was a chore. Adding a beach ball and the diorama is done! It could use a little different layout than Shiori’s, but I thought this one works since the ball doesn’t really obscure any part of Yurika. The minor regret I have with the base is that the final layer of Elmer’s clumps up the saw dust and the sand is no longer smooth.

The eyes I use Masakazu Katsura sensei’s style, having watched too much DNA^2 and liking it.

Probably because I haven’t worked on any kits for so long, this kit was very satisfying. This is one case when “size doesn’t matter”; I’ll take this kit over any huge ass Bome kits any day.