Resin Kit Project Update

For those people that don't know, I've spent the last week working on a resin model kit, my latest project. I've done a lot of plastic models back in high school (my collection is actually in boxes in the basement storage room), however I've never worked with resin before. I've always wanted to do a resin kit, but the cost (to a non-working high school student) and availability of resin kits was quite prohibitive. Not only are the kits more expensive, the tools used for resin are much different and the kits themselves require a lot more work.

I actually ordered the kit back in November of 2005, and due to difficulties from the company I bought it from, I only received it two weeks ago. Well, I got a free poster for my trouble.

The kit I got is of high quality; not a lot of defects, residue, or seams and the pieces actually fit together half decent. That said, it wasn't perfect either and I quickly realized I had a lot of work ahead of me. I should have taken a picture of the pieces before I started, just so I could do a before and after comparison, but I was a bit eager to start.

First step was to get the proper tools. As I mentioned above, I've never worked with resin before and therefore didn't have the proper tools to work with it. So, off to the store. Modelling putty to fill the gaps, holes and seams, $12. Percision knife set (my old blades were dull and I needed more variety), $12. Files! Ended up buying a complete set which contained 6 mini-files mainly because they had handles and were only a few dollars more, $30. Wanted to switch to acrylic paints, my enamel paints are at least 10 years old and not worth salvaging. Besides, acrylics easier to work with and easier to clean up afterwords. Got a set of paints with most of the colours I needed, $17. The set also had some cement (which I can't use on resin), a hobby knife, sandpaper (sweet!), 3 paintbrushes (might come in handy). Found a double-action airbrush at Walmart (always wanted one of those), $60 and included some more paint, and a can of propellant to run the airbrush with. Not quite the set I was looking for, but considering the one I did want was $200 USD and I'm not too sure how many more kits I was going to be doing, not a bad compromise. Well, the propellant lasted a day. So, instead of buying more propellant (which I didn't like in the first place), I was off to find an actual air compressor. Cheapest compressor I saw online was $99 USD. Found craft store in Moncton, they were all soldout of compressors, but the cheapest one was $240 CAD. As fate would have it, the other Walmart in Moncton has the Mighty Mini. . . . an starter airbrush kit with cheap brush bundled with an air compressor. It's listed on the company's website for $99 USD, Walmart price: $70 CAD. So, I bought that, chucked the cheap brush into the corner and went back to work.

Prepping the pieces for painting has been quite challenging. It doesn't help that the putty I got isn't quite the right compound for resin work. It's been quite the learning curve. After doing a preliminary primer coat, all the mistakes really show up. So it was back to square one.

Airbrushing is quite a change from conventional painting with a brush. I've always had a hard time minimizing visible brush strokes from the finished product. Airbrushing eliminates that which is awesome. However, airbrushing uses up a lot more paint. . . there's just as much paint on the cardboard box I'm using as makeshift paint booth as on the model itself. Changing colours is a lot more of a pain. Other beginner mistakes like using too thick/too thin of paint mixture, air regulation problems (especially with the propellant can), poor masking technique all add up. Other painting mistakes I should have picked up on but forgot (such as how thin white paint really is and how hard it is to get it to stick) are proving to be frustrating.

So far, I've put well over $200 CAD into the project in addition to the price of the kit, which was around $60-$70 CAD. It's starting to look pretty good. I'm pretty surprised how well the flesh tone paint I mixed by hand turned out. Getting better, fixing mistakes and applying new techniques as I go. The final product should look pretty good once I'm done.