The Tale of the Two-Headed Garage Kit

Hi, everyone!

I must have some kind of post-holiday blues. I couldn't make myself start writing this post, then couldn't finish it, and for the past couple of days I haven't really been able to do anything at all—I keep jumping from one thing to another. Why did the holidays go by so quickly? For the first time in probably five years I didn't work at all for an entire week. It was wonderful. Can I have some more?..

Today I'll tell you about a Nozomi garage kit from Love Live! that I worked on over two winters and didn't touch at all during spring, summer, or fall. It just happened that way: I received her last winter, slowly started preparing her for paint, then set her aside—I don't remember why—picked her up again this winter, and finally finished her in time for New Year's.

Her distinctive feature is that she comes with two heads, and I'll be honest: this is my nightmare, because I like to put a garage kit in the cabinet and never touch it again... In a case like this, it would make more sense to choose one head and not worry about it, but I couldn't do that here. They're both great: one has pigtails, while the other has an open mouth and a cute braid.

This is how the sculptor envisioned her:

Spring, summer, and fall passed between these two photos :) There are magnets in the arms, legs, and neck because I wasn't too lazy to install them.

Thick winter tights and a very, very bright sweater, which I repainted...

The bag:

The boots:

The base also came into being somewhere around here:

Two faces:

I lost the chain (curse those parts that look like trash) and made a replacement from whatever I had on hand

Next came the bright, bright hair, which I repainted too The base color is Mr. Color Clear Purple.

But it's a great color, isn't it?

Version two, which also went into the paint stripper: Clear Violet over Clear Purple.

And finally, Clear Violet only:

With the bright sweater and hair, the result looked like this:

Then just the hair in version two:

And finally, a version I was completely happy with. We checked the hair color against the art book!

Lots of photos:

Both heads together:

And a few with the Christmas tree:

For now I've decided to leave her with the pigtails, but later I'll probably switch to the open-mouth face. Perhaps I should have gone to the trouble of adapting the open-mouth face to fit the pigtail hair...

To finish, I'll share my garage-kit results from this year and the year before. It turns out I never posted a year-end collage for 2021 here—can't have that :)

Six painted in 2021:

2022: a little more, though two of the kits were repaints—Nonon and Kurisu. It was probably cheating to include them here, but I really did spend time on them

And that's that. Thank you for reading, and I hope your year is off to a wonderful start!

P.S. I hope I can gather my strength and show you the centerpiece garage kit of 2022 soon. It was a rather interesting one :)