COMMISSION:

Here is another commission given to me by another American client. Ruri Hoshino. The client told me that he was a great fan of Ruri being and avid collector of many original artistic works of this character from Nadesico. He wanted me to turn this original kit into something special for him to be able to showcase it at the centre of his living room. He wanted something that anyone visiting his house would feel attracted to. I have to say that I felt quite honored to be able to work on a kit which was to be the centre piece of my client's collection and home. From the start of the work I was determined to do my best t not let the client down.

Cleaning: At first I thought that this Ruri being made of few parts and most importantly being an original kit would not give that much trouble but I was to be proved wrong. Cleaning all the parts turned out to be quite hard. The resin mix used for this kit resulted to be a very hard one so all seam lines proved quite difficult to eliminate completely. The most difficult thing though was the elimination of an unusual large number of tiny air holes of which all parts of the kit was full. I spent many hours after them even after priming.

Pre-Assembly: Another hard aspect of this kit was the pre assembly. The kit was composed of the full body parts which where separated from the costume parts. The costume parts also were divided in many parts as well. After long thoughts I decided to assemble first the legs with the lower abdominal parts. After assuring a strong bondage I added both the pants part of the costume on the legs. The difficult part here was to make the connection lines of the pants totally invisible. The same was done when I joined the upper torso parts with both the arms and after adding the upper part of the costume on them. Again it was quite hard to render all the connection lines invisible. This method effectively divided the kit in 2 large parts, the lower body and the upper body. To this one had just to add the head and 4 hair parts together with the broom and the sandals parts.

Painting: After choosing the above-mentioned assembly method I knew that the painting would not be easy especially where the flash part of the arms, neck and legs was covered by the costume parts but still visible. I was also aware of the specific instructions on how the painting had to be done given to me by my client. We sent at least 20 e-mail to each other to be sure of what the client wanted the painting to look like. First I started with the white part which the client requested to have a grey shading this time. After I tackled the flash part. I first painted the parts covered by the costume with a hand brush then masked the white totally and after airbrushed the flash. I needed not to mask the lower part when painting the flash because red would cover the flash colour well. I had however to mask the legs totally before I painted the red on which the client insisted very much. He wanted it to be a saturated red which had to have a uniform but present shading and finally resulting in a shiny look but not a glossy one. Masking the inner parts of the legs was not easy at all. After about more than 3 hours and seven layers of paint I think I have achieved what the client wanted. Mixing the tones for Ruri's hair colour was also a tough job.