A Garage Kit for the Lazy! [Figure-rise LABO Kotori Minami]

Hi, kitties!

More Love Live! for the shelf!

Today I'll tell you about a kit that left me completely cold when preorders opened. I bought it purely out of curiosity, as something for my child to tinker with, but then I grew very fond of it and even had to bargain with the kid for the right to do as I pleased with the toy. If memory serves, it came out in the spring, right when the border closures began. It sat in HLJ's warehouse for a long time along with various other things. By autumn, no longer expecting the borders to reopen anytime soon, I decided to use a forwarding service and retrieve my stuff. Success. A couple of weeks later, the long-awaited parcel arrived. The box with Kotori took up most of it, although it was very light.

For comparison:

Plastic models had never particularly appealed to me, and I had no idea how to work with this kind of plastic. To my surprise, it turned out to be very light, soft, and pleasant to the touch. Inside the box was a large illustration and a pile of parts on sprues, plus assembly instructions. The face is made in an interesting way.

Without putting it off, I started assembling her; I was terribly curious to see what it would be like to work on one. The places where the parts joined were very easy to sand, much easier than on garage kits.

Kits like this don't need to be painted, but I decided to add some shading to this sweet little thing. Shaded on the left, unshaded on the right, plus some of the parts I assembled on the first evening.

Everything fits together evenly and neatly; credit to the manufacturer for molding it this well. There are stickers for the sock and the hair ties (a poor solution: they started peeling off only two weeks after assembly). After reading a warning-filled post on Tsuki, I followed the instructions—the assembly order matters here. Sweet little legs

Where the gaps were larger, I used Tamiya cement. Thanks to Pin and Moko for their advice on working with it! A couple of years ago, I thought I'd simply bought some useless, strange glue The way it works is practically witchcraft. If only there were something like it for garage kits…

For comparison, a ball with cement and one without—the difference is plain to see! And the bow, which came in two halves. I also smoothed the seams in the hair with it as much as I could.

The hair is practically a model kit of its own

I decided to spray the inner skirts and sleeves with an SMS pearl. Its pigment is rather coarse for my garage kits, so it had been sitting unused for a long time.

I added some shading to the skirts, then started assembling. I used nothing but clears and/or pearls so everything would look neat and pretty.

But I hit an unexpected snag after deciding to give the balls both edge shading and pearl. The lower layer of paint melted beneath the upper one, no matter how thoroughly it had dried or how carefully I'd scuffed the glossy surface beforehand with a soft sanding sponge…

Oh well. I removed everything (the paint comes off easily with a soft sanding sponge) and sprayed them with pearl alone…

And this is the only part I didn't touch with paint at all—the color is simply that beautiful :3

The base was just a plain white disk, and we decided to fill it with treats. This was my first time using jewelry-grade epoxy resin, but I must have got the proportions wrong: instead of an hour, it took the entire night to cure. I also had an awful time prying it out of the mold and even slightly damaged the edges in places. Every paint I'd never used before went into action.))

And here is the result!

How delicately she holds the little balls in place with her hand…

And against a black background:

And that's the girl I ended up with. They captured the little bird's personality so well, and she came out incredibly sweet. Without paint, she can be assembled in an evening; with a light paint job, in two or three evenings. It feels so good to just pick something up and build it! Honestly, it is made astonishingly well. I had expected enormous gaps and a completely flat-looking result. I hadn't had such quick satisfaction from a kit in ages, which is why I called her a garage kit for the lazy—even though, technically, she isn't a garage kit at all, of course :’) Ah, if only I could paint some Aqours girls now…

I'll stop here.

Thank you for reading, and good luck to everyone who stopped by!