Shiki

Shiki is a character from the SNK game Samurai Spirits 64. I like the character design very much… girl ninja with tattoo, who can say no? WooD made 2 Shiki’s, one is the static Shiki and the other is action Shiki playing her swords. This kit is the static one. Although it suits her character better, I prefer kits with more dynamic pose. Nevertheless WooD did a great job posing her in this kit, and the twisting of her arms and the head breaks mediocrity. This makes the kit viewable in many different angles, especially the back. Finally her expression is dead in – mysterious, evil and calm.

Shiki has a beautiful tattoo on her back running down to her left leg. The tattoo outline is scribed onto the kit, but the scales weren’t.

Tattoo – I wanted to do this well… almost spent two days on it. First I tried to completely use artist oil on it, but without a base coat the oil doesn’t cover evenly and it looks quite bad. Then I wiped everything and started over, this time, using tamiya acrylics for base coat. I’m too lazy to liquid mask, so I carefully spray in the acrylics, and use alcohol to remove the overspray. It kind of works, although I suspect I may have slightly tinted the skin. Then comes the scales. I tried to paint in the fine lines with every kinds of paint, but it was too tedious. Then comes the good’ol Micro-pigment pen from pentel, I used a 0.005 and it made the job tons easier. Then I shade and highlight each scale to give it some depth and also partially cover the pen marks. Finally I sprayed lightly over the area to make it looks like the tattoo is under the skin. However Shiki’s tattoo is quite dark colored so this doesn’t work as well as I hoped.

Clothing – Shiki’s blue body suit looks like spandex, and somehow I’ve got this idea that it’s slightly reflective. So I mixed some metallic green into blue to get that reflective look (without getting too shiny). I also used oil on the flowerly pattern on the kimono.

Base – I saw the base in Hobby Japan Ex 98 and they added some branches and leaves on the rock Shiki is standing and it looks really good. Eventually I picked some small branches on my way home and used those. I don’t know if I should put leaves on them though… the branches I’ve got looks kind of dead and it fitted the atmosphere of the kit, so I left out the leaves (also due to laziness 🙂
I made a decal of Shiki’s kanji name and put it on the wood plaque, but without white backing the decal looks very fade. I had to paint on the decal (very silly imo).

Hair – Like Natsumi, I used insulated copper wires for hair strands. I added a lot this time since the sample photo has lots of them too, and it fits the hair style very well. However copper wires are too malleable and they bend easily, and once bent it’s hard to get it straight. Some of the strands are wrigzzly as a result. I think I may try something else next time. I used midnight blue, as semi-gloss paint, for the hair; but the glossiness just doesn’t work. It’s probably because Shiki isn’t really portrayed as an anime character in the sculpture, and the hair is scupted in better detail than many other GKs. Eventually I flat coated it.

Swords – I used Gunze’s Mr. Metal color for these and polish them to a good metallic shine. Since Japanese swords are blackened on the dull edge, I was trying to duplicate the effect by having steel on the dull edge and chrome silver on the sharp. Ehhhh… not too successful.

Finally due to my lack of test-fitting, I didn’t know the hair should go after the left hand is in place… don’t repeat my mistake 🙂