I’m working on another Fate/Stay night kit, this time of servant Rider. Usually I don’t go in for overly sexy poses, but I think I really liked this one and its not too bad. Of the other rider kits I was considering, I really liked the pose of the 1/12 kotobukiya one sculpted by Shirahige Tsukuru 白髭創, but being 1/12 scale I was hesitant to work on it.

Another kit I was interested in was the 1/6 WHF event only sculpted by Ikeda Ryouichi 池田良一. That one was obviously an adult kit, but if I did find it, I would have resculpted her clothes. It seems to be the only static pose standing Rider kit that I have seen available. I really liked the long straight hair on it.

This kit I got was available at WHF August 29^th 2004. The same sculpture was available as a pre-painted Goodsmile Company PVC in 2005. The sculptor for the PVC is listed as Yoshi, but on the kit package, the sculptor is listed as How(s). I guess they are the same person though because its the same sculpt. My version of the kit has the WHF sticker. I was surprised to not find a Type Moon sticker also. But I found some pictures of an Illya kit in similar packaging. And one had a Type Moon sticker, and the other a WHF, but they did not have both stickers.Pictures from Mandarake. I prefer the Type Moon Sticker since its a hologram.But I’m glad I got the blue WHF sticker, instead of the grey one shown on Ilya’s package.My kit was never opened before. The packaging was a plastic Ziploc bag stapled closedThe parts list. I dont like the way it is printed. It feels like it was just repeatedly xeroxed. This paper was also in the bag. I bought these Silver age comic book bags and boards hoping to store doujinshi in them, only to realize that they was just a tab too small and I needed the golden age size. So I store garage kit paperwork in the silver age bags. So on to the kit. The cast is excellent quality. Part fit is really great. At first I thought those were huge seamlines, but actually they are part of the kit.The mask is really nicely sculpted and extremely clean. If there was any seamlines or flash I would have ending up breaking the mask while trying to clean it. It fits on the face perfectly but falls right off also. The smaller hair pieces were in a separate bag. The way the hair drapes down to the floor was really appealing to me. I’ve never seen another kit like it. Plus I prefer the “imaginary” hair colors ( blues, pinks, etc) over the natural colors (black, blonde etc).

Prep Work

Ok so after looking over the parts, I wash them with Dawn soap to remove the mold residue. If you are washing over the sink, its a good idea to have a drain catcher, just incase a part falls. I would usually wear gloves for this part so that my hands don’t have to be washed 20x times. And lastly I use a brush to scrub the pieces. Sometimes after scrubbing the parts, I will let them soak in soapy water for a little bit. Then I lay all the parts out to dry. Half the kit is hair. There were only a few seamlines, but a lot more pinholes to fill. I used tamiya putty. I really didnt like the nail polish for thinning, so I used Winsor and Newton Brush cleaner and restorer. This stuff is good for thinning, but using too much and it will eat away the putty. It can be used to remove putty once it has cured also. I had wanted to use a lot less putty but I end up using so much all the time. Next I pinned the parts. I used the 3/64 for the body and 1/32 for the hair. This kit also had the pre-drilled holes for pins. Part fit looks fine. So I glue the pins in place and drill another hole for the toothpics. The resin along the back of the skirt was extremely thin. The legs fit into the torso perfectly, but when I drilled for the pin, I placed it at too much of an angle. So it created too much tension in an already tight fit, and it caused the thin resin to crack. This turned into a huge problem to fix, and probably I would have not pinned the area if I had known. More on this later. Next on work on the hair. Figuring out how the hair is suppose to fit can be a little tricky, but it actually isn’t so bad. First you can see that there are four main hair strands that fix on the top and back of the head. Then just try to match up the top half with the bottom. The parts fit perfectly. So now the four main hair strands are paired off, but two hair strands remained. One of the main hair strands, had a space to fix the other strand. I used some tamiya putty to fill in pinholes, but I didnt really sand the seamlines, because it could just look like sculpted-in hair. Now I drill and pin the hair. The hair also had pre-drilled holes like the rest of the kit. I used the smaller 1/32 drill bit. I lost the paper on the wire, so I have no idea what size it is. I extended some of the bottom hair parts in an effort to try to have them flatter on the ground. Then I filled in the gaps with magic sculpt. On the left you can see that the hair is not flat on the ground anymore after the the magic sculpt cured. So I used a heat gun to try to flatten the hair more. It doesn’t keep 100% The PVC version had little pegs on the bottom of the hair so that it fits into the base. That was actually a great idea to keep the hair flat. I on’t intend to use a base, so the hair is slightly raised. It was difficult to heat bend the parts in this case, because I was not sure how they were suppose to go unless the hair was already put together, and then it was hard to get a good grip on it, maybe it I had an extra pair of hands…Back to that little crack on the skirt. I used glue at first when the crack was little. But it did not hold and it did not look clearly flat. So I thought to use tamiya putty but that did not work either. The crack was getting worst each time I was doing a test fitting to make sure the area was flat and even, until finally the piece broke off completely. Instead of trying to glue it back again, I just resculpted the area with magic sculpt. After I sanded, the area was a little uneven, so I used tamiya putty instead of more magic sculpt because of the quicker drying time. Next I primed the kit by hand using liquitex gesso, matte medium, water. The priming was horrible the first time. But I did not realize the primer was so terrible until it was already dry. So I had to soak the parts in water and peel off all the primer. Second try came out much better.

Painting

Now I am ready to paint and these are all the possible paints I might use. Sample left picture is from myfigurecollect. The middle from Yahoo Japan auction, taken at WHF. And the right is a picture of the actual PVC release, from Hobby search. So when I first saw this kit, I really liked how the sample pictures seemed to show a deep teal highlight for her clothes instead of monotone black of the The PVC release.Black and Blue green. The color ended up being very dark after painting many layers. I used Createx retarder and hand painted the shading wet on wet. I really really like how it turned out and i think its the best part of the kit. I shaded the skin the same way also. I dont think it came out as smooth as the clothes. I change the eyes many times, with this being the first version.I was going to paint the magenta part glossy metallic but ended up not doing it. The hair was highly detailed with many hair strands sculpted in. I wanted to darken all the lines and I tried using the vallego paints and createx retarder, but I ended up not liking how it was looking. Basically I could not do a neat job and the paint was drying too fast to do the full hair. So I striped the paint off and primed the hair. But since the main figure was done, I glued all the parts together. When I repainted the hair, I glued the front hair strands first, followed by the back left then back right. I tried to glue both the back hairs at the same time, but the right one slipped and caused a slight mess. The glue spot looked bad, but it was easily fixed by lightly sanding the area and repainting. After the hair was glued, gaps were between the four parts. I used modeling paste to fix. Now what happened is that I used some thinned with water Duo Aqua paint to shade the hair. The shading itself was fine, but as it turns out, I did not like the color at all. Even though it was just a little bit different than the previous color, I thought it was the wrong shade and too dark. But the hair was already glued in place and I did not want to try pulling it apart. So I just decided to repaint the hair completely attach to the rest of the model. It meant I had to touch up many areas that were fine before >_<…. I am still working on this model a little bit more, but that is how it looks for now.This picture was taken with the flash. You can see her mask painted also. I didn’t take any more pictures will her mask on. On going to display her with mask off.the next day I touched up some more areas with paint. And I shaded the hair a little bit with chalk pastels. I used white for the highlights, and a dark purple for some lowlights. after that I dry brushed Golden iridescent violet on the hair. And thats it, she is complete.

Completed Pictures

I must have taken over 500 pictures but anything I tried to photograph the face, the picture came out either very blurry or way too bright. So these are the best of my pictures. Her hands and 75% of the hair is flat on the ground, but to take the pictures, the model itself was not flat on the ground all the time, making those parts appeared raised.