My FIRST Garage Kit - Makishima Shogo - Completed!!!

Ok, so after what seems like forever I have finally compeleted my Psycho-Pass Makishima Shogo garage kit!! Words do not even describe the joy I feel from FINALLY completing this, LOL!! Just friggin YAY!!!

So, I figured to celebrate his completion, I would share some pics (ok not some, but there a LOT) of the journey to completion!! There are some laughable moments (where I thought I may should just nuke the kit and be done), but in the end I am happy with the results....as this is my FIRST time EVER to paint and assemble a garage kit, and my FIRST time EVER to use an airbrush. LOL...I know....WTF was I thinking right (at this point I should be fucking up Tshirts or Trucker hats with my airbrush gun, not attempting a Garage Kit?!!).

Again, there's lot of pics, and so I've put most of them under **Spoiler** tags that you'll need to expand so you can see the pics.

And so....hope you enjoy!!!

Some of the parts....of course had to remove the "tags" on these, sand, wash several times (with degreaser, as I hear that removes the mold-release):





**CLICK HERE FOR ADDITIONAL PICS**






Next up was actually priming...now I've heard you do not HAVE to prime resin, but I am new, so want to go the safest route possible for someone like me who is guaranteed to screw things up...probably a lot. Anyway, it just so happens that I got a really awesome Iwata airbrush gun and compressor as well as a ventilation booth for Christmas!! Wohoo!!



Priming - I used both a dark gray primer and white depending on the piece. Skin areas were done with white, most everything else with the gray:



Here are some shots of the shirt in progress. For it I started with the gray primer. I then actually did another coat in white primer over the top, with less white in the shaded areas. Next was an actual layer of white acrylic, lightly all over. I then went into the shaded areas with a darker teal color. I put a light flesh color (VERY light coat) on the areas where his shirt was touching his skin and highlighted. Finally another layer of the white acrylic, brushed over the entire shirt to blend all the shading/highlighting:





**CLICK HERE FOR ADDITIONAL PICS**
(sorry for the lines in some of these pics....an odd thing occurred when the pics I took were under the ventilation hood...the light diffusing through the plastic booth somehow caused this anomaly. Or maybe aliens, which is really my first guess...but I'll let you decide.)









For the pants, I took a similar approach. I painted them dark gray with the primer. I then went in with black in the creases, and white in the highlighted areas. I went over the top of those with a jean blue shade to even it out. After it was still a bit too dark, so I went over the entire piece to increase highlighting and shading with some pastels (just use sandpaper to create the powder then dry brush them on). After I sprayed it with Mr. Super Clear Flat clear coat, to seal in the pastels.






**CLICK HERE FOR ADDITIONAL PICS**







The pastels make it look really light and chalky, but the clear coat fixes all that....










Next is just some shots of some odds and ends, like the shoes, belt, book, skin, fingernails, etc....



**CLICK HERE FOR ADDITIONAL PICS**











For the hair...well I had some trial and error here. First I primed with dark gray, then put a white coat over the top. To add more shading I went back in with dark pastels. That looked like crap, as I realized at this point I did not sand these parts enough...there are still some pretty rough areas and imperfections that I could've fixed by some thorough sanding...this REALLY stood out when I added the shading to the hair (you can still see some of the rough areas on various parts...they weren't really visible until you added flat paint then they were REALLY obvious...well I know for next time), so I redid the hair. The final version is just the gray primer, which also doubled as shading, and white acrylic paint...and I sprayed less in the shaded areas of the hair.





**CLICK HERE FOR ADDITIONAL PICS**







Ok, next up is the face. ....sigh....
This portion is where I wanted to nuke this entire kit, and let me show you why..LOL. Try not to hurt yourself when laughing at attempt 1 and 2 (and there were others, but they didn't even get far enough along for me to snap pics of). I finally found a method of painting his eyes that worked out, but I did have to start over, including stripping and sanding and re-priming, etc.. a few times.

And here is where you can get a good chuckle (I don't even want to share this, as v1 and v2 are just so laughable and well ebarassing...LOL, and v3 is by no means perfect, but is WAY better...so I'm learning):



Yeah, hopefully you're still with me and didn't kill over from laughing. I honestly think v2 may be an alien....his eyes were really big there.

Anyway, v1 (far left one) is where I just tried to straight up paint the eyes all in one go using acrylics and a TINY permanent no bleed pen. I think the pen was like .20mm and was way too big. It turned out a hot mess.

The v2 (middle pic) is where I tried to follow advice from a miniature painter on Youtube. I think a combination of me sucking as a painter and the fact that on a true miniature a wee bitty mistake is likely ok, where here it's just well... It's an alien, let's move on.

Finally v3 (far right) is thanks to PONNIE!!!! THANK YOU PONNIE!!! A most wonderful and extremely pro and talented garage kit painter. After she posted one of her GK blogs, she was soooo very kind to answer 100,000 of my questions on how the #@%##% she did her eyes. She then described a wonderful technique using some of this stuff:



And it allows you to paint, erase, and clean up your lines...without ever damaging the paint underneath. Basically you get your skin and eye whites painted on, then spray a clear gloss coat of the Mr. Color Super Clear GX lacquer (the thinner is so you can use it with the airbrush). Now, using enamel paints you can trial and error and erase and cleanup all your paint lines all you want (I used a small detail brush to paint the eyes on, then cleaned up the lines with a different really small detail brush dipped in the X-20 enamel thinner). The enamel thinner takes the enamel right off, without impacting your gloss lacquer coat or any paint beneath it. So, you can basically erase and repaint all you want, until you get it ok.

THANKS PONNIE!!!




**CLICK HERE FOR ADDITIONAL PICS**

Skin tone painted on:



I had to redo the face several times, so I would frequently double check that my "re-painted" face skin still matched other fleshy areas (as seen above).

The lacquer / enamel face trick:









Next was assembly time!!! I used super glue, 2 part 5 min Epoxy, and also put some metal pins in between each piece (via little holes in each piece and super glued it in) to help support and reinforce the joins.







**CLICK HERE FOR ADDITIONAL PICS**
I ended up having a pretty big gap in the top of his hair after attaching all three pieces to his head. To remedy this I applied Apoxie sculpt into the crack, let it dry for 24 hours, then sanded it even and repainted the top of his head (after CAREFULLY masking off his face so I didn't ruin my 2352th face-paint job)











The base was a custom base I made using a CNC router and some miniatures I picked up at a hobby store.



For more details on the base, I had a whole separate blog for that, so if your curious you can read about it and see WIP pics here: **Blog for Custom Makishima Base**


I ended up drilling two really small holes into the base and his feet. I then put cut some brad nails to size and used those for pegs to hold him to the base.

And finally......my very first garage kit is complete.... Meet my Makashima Shogo!!!








**CLICK HERE FOR ADDITIONAL PICS OF MAKISHIMA**

- it was sprinkling out when I took some of these pics, so if you see some areas that looks like paint run, it's just rain drops! Sorry! :D
















I did snap a couple of other pics of Makishima with Kougami as well (you can click on them to go to their main page to see a larger version):




And if you're just a glutton for punishment, you can view even MORE pics (and in higher resolution) at my Smug Mug project page here. I loaded pretty much all my pics here, so you can see a lot of the failed attempts too (but WARNING, there are LOTS of pics...so don't say you weren't warned!!).

Sorry that was so long, and hope the all the pics didn't crash you!!

Thanks for checking my blog out, hope you saw something you enjoyed!! :D