Gokufan's Celestial Genesis: Jingwei

So I know I said there wasn’t enough content to do a whole update on the rest of the sphere, but then I remembered the tubes! I have to mention them because they were by far the most aggravating part of this whole project, which was otherwise quite fun. I’ll start with finishing up the sphere though:

I started by painting gory red in all the crevices, to create an impression that this was some sort of gnarly biomechanical monstrosity with gore subtly oozing out where plates/carapace/whatever meet. From there I used some paints on my palette (I’ll be honest, I totally forget which) to create a grimey grey brown color, which I roughly highlighted up by adding white. I then brought it back down a bit with a AP dark tone wash.

From there I went and painted all the various metal gubbins gold  in the same manner as all of the other gold bits on the mini. Not a lot of new info here, but I think they look pretty nice!

Now, those damn tubes. In case you can’t tell, these things are tiny, 4/6 are thinner than a strand of spaghetti. Additionally, they have fairly strange twisting shapes, so unless you attached the main structural tube between Jingwei and the eyeball perfectly they’re probably not going to fit quite right.

Finding a method that was both dexterous and gentle enough to position these tiny pieces of resin between Jingwei’s back and the eyeball was pretty difficult. I eventually came up with a method where I lightly stuck a tube onto a glob of poster tack and then held the glob with a pair of tweezers. Even then it took me over an hour to get the 6 of them hooked up and I still didn’t line up some of them with the holes on her back. Thankfully there’s so much going on between her back and the eyeball it doesn’t show in photos and you’d never know unless you were specifically looking for it. Also the tiniest one had an air bubble in it and broke in half, thankfully I was able to glue it back together.

Anyway, my advice if you’re building this mini and really want to perfectly attach those tubes is a) leave her arms off until the tubes have been connected and b) use some sort of gentle heating element to bend them into place. Probably more work than tube perfection is worth imo, unless you’re planning on making it a contest piece or something.

Anyway, there’s your taste of my personal tube nightmare. Thanks for reading my rant! (or at least looking at my pictures :p).

Now that the mini itself is done we’re on to the base for the next update.