1/8 Seras Victoria Completed

Whew, after lots of work I'm finally done. My first figure kit and I think I did pretty well for a first attempt. Hopefully I'll be able to continue learning lots of new things and get better.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1/8 Seras Victoria WIP 2

This is going to be the last update before I post some final pictures.

Since the last WIP I masked off the leg and painted the boots and gloves a brown color. Masking was done using mostly Tamiya tape. For some areas I made my own thin tape with a fresh Xacto blade and a ruler. The belt was painted black and then the buckle was painted in gold. The belt was masked off and then the clothes were painted using yellow. The hair was painted using just a lighter yellow. Finally, the band on the right sleeve was painted using grey.

After this all the details were hand painted. These details include the buttons on the clothes, the trim for the collar, the Hellsing badge on the left breast and any minor touchups that were needed. The face was pretty tough, especially the eyes since it is a 1/8 figure and everything is pretty small. I was using a #0 brush but maybe I need to get ones even smaller in order to get the small details.

The base was painted using Delta Creamcoats and Tamiya acrylics. I first used a thinned black to make the light grey stones, then mixed in some Delta Creamcoat browns and oranges to achieve various other colors. After this I used a very thinned out Tamiya black to make a wash and to fill in the gaps between stones. The gaps between cobblestones on the street is usually not stark white (the color of the plaster) simply due to dirt and grime.

I still need to flat coat the face and then use future to make areas such as the eyes and lips more glossy in contrast to the rest of the face. After that I'm planning on building a light box so I can take some good final pictures.


Colors Used:

• Yellow (clothes) - Tamiya Flat Yellow


• Light Yellow (hair) - Tamiya Flat Yellow + Tamiya Flat White


• Brown (boots and glove) - Tamiya Flat Earth + Tamiya Flat Black


• Red (badge) - Tamiya Flat Red


• Gold (buckle) - Tamiya Flat Gold


• Grey (band on sleeve) - Tamiya Flat White + Tamiya Flat Black


• Black (belt) - Tamiya Flat Black

1/8 Seras Victoria WIP 1

 

This is a lot of firsts for me - my first resin kit, my first work in prog, and I'm also trying a lot of new techniques. I've only built two Gundam kits before this, the 1/100 HG Tallgeese III and the MG God Gundam. I airbrushed both but I am still trying to learn a lot of new things since I was not completely satisfied with how they turned out. I got interested in figure kits after seeing FilmMkr's works on the FichtenFoo Forums.

This particular kit is the 1/8 Seras Victoria from Hellsing and was purchased from e2046 about a year ago. I have been working on this on and off for the past year, but did not really have much time to work on it due to school. I finally got around to sitting down and working on this kit quite a bit in the last week or so since finals just got done.

 

 

 

 

It's a pretty simple kit which is why I chose this one to start with. I first soaked all the parts in a degreaser (PurplePower equivalent) and then scrubbed it with some SoftScrub. The hardest part was the cleanup of the "wing," which is what occupied most of my time during the cleanup. I primed, sanded, fixed defects, and then repeated the process several times.

 

 

 

Since this was my first resin kit I had some trouble with the pinning of the kit, especially where the arm connects to the body because it would tend to rotate on me so I had to have two pins. I also had trouble getting the head to stay in the position I wanted, but I managed to solve this when I drilled a larger hole for the pin and used a 3/32" brass rod instead of paper clips.

I first painted the wing and used straight Tamiya Acrylic Flat Black. It came out pretty well. I had wanted to try to emulate the pearly black luster that FilmMkr got on one of his newer kits, Daphne's Surprise, but didn't want to spend the extra money on PearlEx powders. I found Delta Creamcoat sells this Pearl stuff so I tried that but it was really hard to get a good even effect so after doing a test I decided to not do it on the actual wing.

I clearcoated the wing with some Future and then after about half an hour tried to lightly sand it to get it smoother, but it started to take some paint off. After trying to handbrush some black on I realized that the alcohol used to thin the paint was reacting with the paint already on the part and in the end I decided to just dunk the piece in degreaser and repaint it. This time I waited a full day to let the Future cure and then rubbed some Tamiya Finishing Compound on it to get it smoother.

Next up was painting the flesh tones. I did not want to spend too much money all at once so I opted to go with Delta Creamcoats for the skin tone. I used a formula from GKJapan.com:

3 parts white

1 part parchment

1 part tangerine orange

Using that ratio it came out a bit too orangy for me so I then added a bit more white and parchment to lighten it up a bit since Seras is a vampire after all!

After spraying a few coats of this I used chalk pastels to shade the kit. I got some Faber-Castell chalk pastels at a local art store and they work great. I just followed what FilmMkr does and rubbed some onto a sheet of sandpaper and then tapped the pastels into the areas I wanted to shade. I then blew off the pastels and blended it away from the applied area. It took a few applications to get the color to build up. After the application I sealed it with a coat of Future to prevent the shading from getting wiped off when I mask it.

I have also been working on a base for the kit. My plan is to have the base to have a cobblestone look since Hellsing takes place in England and I thought that the cobblestones would fit. I used a small square wooden base from Michael's and painted the base black.



Then I made a box frame out of some cardboard and poured plaster of paris into it about an inch high. I remember FichtenFoo making a stone lighthouse using this method and thought that if he got good results I should just go ahead and try to emulate that.

After the plaster dried I sanded the top a bit to make it flatter so the figure would be able to stand flat on the base. I then used scribing tools to carve out a cobblestone pattern. I plan on painting it with some acrylics.

Some reference images for the cobblestone:

 

 

And after scribing the plaster I was able to get a suitable pattern in the base.