Blue Mary – King of Fighters – 1/8 – resin figure

[alpine-phototile-for-picasa-and-google-plus src=”private_user_album” uid=”ctkwok” ualb=”6046040242719218801″ authkey=”CKejyMvl2Oe8Mw” imgl=”fancybox” style=”bookshelf” row=”6″ size=”320″ num=”40″ shadow=”1″ align=”center” max=”100″]If you think this looks like some sort of commercial, it probably is

Introduction

Scale 1/8

Sculptor Yukishiro

Maker Yukishiro

Completed 8/10/03

Parts 11

Retail 9000yen

What can I say… just a simple WOW. With my love for dynamic poses, I was immediately impressed by her. To be honest, I had been very disappointed by the recent surge of statically posed figures – to a point when I thought there was a decline in the overall quality of kits and disinterest in new releases. Sorry, I’ll rant about that later However for all its goodness, the reward for building this kit didn’t come until later, when I tried to capture some good shots of her. From different angles, you don’t simply get a different view, but a different feeling of the power of Mary’s kick as well. The reason is this kit is very asymmetric – she doesn’t look the same from the left or right, top or bottom, etc. This is one factor that makes a figure interesting. I think to create such a figure, the sculptor has to have a pretty good sense of space… and talking about space, even though she’s a 1/8 figure, her leap gives her a much larger span, and she can be almost the same size as some of my 1/6 figures. And she comes with the wasted building base to boot… an almost perfect setup!

Now that I’m done with her coolness, onto her half-assed sexiness (literally ^O^)! Showing off top of her butt is a great idea, and the swaying front is meticulously taken care of with that shirt-digging-into-flesh, squeezing-too-tight effect. Thats’ a lot of hypenation

With all her glory, the kit has one flaw – the details are not very crisp. May be it was for easier casting, but the ends of her hair were not only blunt, but actually rounded off. This gives her a very crude look because the head is usually the most detailed part on a figure (like cockpits in an airplane ^_^), so I think it is important to fix it. Another minor nitpick is one of the raised blocks of the wasted building hides one of the legs from some angles, so I detached it to make some of the cool shots.

Ok I’m done with the exultation, onto some introduction ^_^;; Blue Mary is a fighter from the long-running line of SNK duel games beginning with Fatal Fury and later King of Fighters. This is a great page for Blue Mary info so I’ll just leave it to the expert. The mystery about her however is… how the heck does her belt stay on???

Anyway the stars on her pants appears in may different colors and sizes, and I like the white star/circle variant that I used , which is one of the US Army insigna and makes sense given her background. Kit Review

Seam lines: 2/5 Pinholes: 3/5 Casting: 3/5 Fit: 2/5 Part Break: 3/5 Help

Unfortunately this kit wasn’t cast very well, and the long seam line running through her pants was quite tedious to remove. Parts in general don’t fit well and a lot of puttying is needed. The left leg is broken midway in the thigh so it was some work there. The base also has some places that looks like smooth craters, which are probably caused by insufficient pressure in casting or gigantic airbubbles trapped at the tips of the piece. She took a lot of time to surface prepare.

Building

Most of the modifying work was in the hair. I splitted and thinned some of the raised areas from the hair so that they’re more like hair, and I used dissolved putty to create some finer hair strips. For her bangs I used pla-plate to create groups of strands. In the process I managed to stab the tip of my index finger and created a 5cm deep gap – it didn’t even start bleeding until several seconds later! Ewwww

In the middle of doing the insigna; the blue stuff on top is the masking tape cut to the insigna. In this case, a negative mask is better than a positive one because it’s very difficult to align the star and the circle otherwise. I want a more rough jean feeling for the pants so I drybrushed quite a lot on it.

The kit has some casting problems, and the base was missing big chunks. Here I use Mori Mori to fill up the area and reform the shape, then before it completely dried, I used rolled up aluminum foil to recreate the relief.