Honoka Carrying the Flag

Almost like Chaika carrying her coffin…

Hello, everyone!

Honoka was an impulse buy for me this year. Even more surprisingly, I started painting her as soon as she arrived (an unheard-of event—she didn't even get to lie around for a couple of years x)). At the start of the year, Nastya, minami_desu, sent me a Suruga-ya link to a cool Honk I sort of wanted, though not badly enough to put any actual effort into getting her.

The listing had exactly zero photos of the kit, but I learned everything I needed from the description, sparse as it was. This was the Honk that was supposed to be in there:

…and this is the one that arrived, by the same sculptor and sold at the same WF…wtf!

At first I thought I'd toss her somewhere far out of sight and forget her for years, but after turning the parts over in my hands, I saw that someone had already done a little work on the kit—the girl was partly pinned and sanded, but then something went wrong and the kit was set aside. And sold. What a twist.

So I decided to finish the job, but with the outfit repainted into something nicer (I don't like the Sunny Day Song costumes, sorry). The outfit from the SIFAS title screen seemed perfect—the one on the right in the screenshot. There were two possible color schemes, and by a secret Masonic-lodge vote—meaning a coin toss—we chose the version on the left.

Next came a certain amount of agony trying to match the hair color. Pretty and vivid, but not right!

A few tiny decals that are completely invisible, but they are there!

A beautiful blue.

And gold lacing.

And, of course, the eyes! Mmm, yandere Honk.

And now we've reached the thing I should have started with: a large, heavy piece of plastic on a thin stick. (Good thing there was a pin inside, though even that, sadly, is no panacea.)

Looks like a spear

I coated the flag, like the base, in Rainbow Chameleon—one of those paints you can rarely find anything suitable to spray it on, but IT SHINES SO PRETTILY. And here it was exactly right!

Also, the flag is designed like a gacha animation when a UR card drops, heh-heh-heh…

Gluing the flag in place proved to be the hardest task. It had to stand straight, stay in her hands, and look normal instead of hanging down like a strand of snot at the bottom… Since the kit was already assembled and I'd planned simply to lay the flag in her hands (for some reason I thought it would stay there on its own—why would it?), the whole glue dance began. That was followed by soaking the parts that had suffered unfairly in boiling water to remove epoxy from places it had no business being. Whew, I think it worked! But I fully preassembled the next kit on magnets, pinned it anywhere magnets wouldn't be enough, and fitted even the tiniest parts—anything to keep glue from ruining my darling girl. There aren't any weighty flags on that one, though there could potentially have been a problem with the balance of the whole kit because of its tiny contact point. But that's a story for another time.

And now, let's look at Honoka!

And that's the sunny girl I ended up with :3

Thank you all for reading!