Chichoni: The Embrace

Produced by Streamline

The Finished Kit – built by someone else

This is one of the very first garage kits I ever bought – when I knew very little about the hobby . I bought it off ebay.

7 November

Lots of seam-scraping, lots of joint filling and grinding away of resin later. The instructions suggest you fit the two figures together at an early stage but obviously I want to paint them separately – preferably with an air brush – and have them as preassmbled as much as possible when I do it.

I nervously glued the legs to the torso of both figures and test fitted them. I reckon I can just about get away with painting them separately if I leave off the robot’s right arm until later. That’s the theory anyway

Primed & ready

Nov 21

After airbrushing both figures, I’m reasonably happy with the results. I used a mixture of black and silver ink on the robot and a Freakflex suntanned mix on the woman. Although the pictures don’t show it, there is some transparency around her breasts but I’ve gone for more subtle than the ‘wet tee-shirt’ look.

The base was done mostly with rattle-can Army Painter primer colours which have worked quite well. I’m debating about whether to try and do more chipped paint. I made a wooden base slightly bigger than the resin and primed it with black metal primer, then glued the resin base to it. Hope to attach the robot soon – he’s awkward to work with.

Too much rust on the robot at the moment but I’m not worried – I’ll darken the seams and brush with silver to increase the contrast. I noticed that paint and ink are not sticking to the base easily or the robot so I’ve dull-koted everything.

xx

Nov 23rd

Bought some ‘dry’ rust paint from Games Workshop in Bromley – thanks, Billy. It looks like flourescent paint but it works quite nicely and has given me the very thin seams of rust I wanted.

I glued the nameplate and the robot onto the base today so it shouldn’t take me that much longer to assemble the kit. Still cant find the right coloured wire for the cables but I should be able to do something with what I have found.

29 November

What’s the worse sound you can hear? The crunch of a delicate resin piece under your foot which has somehow got onto the floor. As it happens, it wasn’t irreparable – one of her gloves lost two fingers and a bit of edge but I was able to rebuild them.

Fitting the figures together was very tricky – especially the robot hands which had to go into depressions in the body. I glued them on before I attempted to assemble the two figures but one hand ‘slipped’ a little and I ended up having to fill in the depressions around the fingers and repaint it. I filled in gaps around the robot arms and wrists with black milliput – which proved a godsend yet again.

I was worried about using the wire but in the end it was okay. I used a small piece of three-core stripped of its sheath and bought quite a lot of different coloured tubing which will come in handy for other robot models (I already know of one I want to build). I grunged it up with a light spray of black paint and some Tamiya smoke which helped to give it the right grease-monkey feel. I was reasonably happy with the results.

I used some clear blue Tamiya (thinned) to add a few bluish tinges to the robot. (I don’t generally like Tamiya paints but their clear colours are really good for glassy effects and tinting teeth in monsters)

30 November

99 percent done. I’ve just got to shade the gloves and do some touching up and I’ll take some hopefully better-than-last-time photos and post the results in the gallery