The Gem Post

Hi everyone! It's been a while since I wrote anything, but now, at last, another little garage kit is finished and I'm ready to share several results at once under the umbrella of...

Hi everyone!

It's been a while since I wrote anything, but now, at last, another little garage kit is finished and I'm ready to share several results at once under the umbrella of the beautiful gems from Houseki no Kuni. One of them is a whole year and a half late, ohoho (how time flies)...

All right, let's begin! I'd meant to write about the first of these kits at the end of last year, but something went wrong... It's a little Diamond bust from E2046 that sat around for an indecently long time and yellowed quite badly. E's resin is merciless: if you don't paint it, or at least prime it with clear varnish right away, you get a blast of yellow straight to the face. And here we are. I'd planned to use chromatic Alclad so it would shimmer like a real diamond, but I had to take a different route. Pick a color that contrasts with yellow and revive it into something pretty! Yes, this isn't the classic transparent Diamond throwing rainbow highlights in the light, but I ended up liking this approach even more :)

A little Grandpa Lenin in rainbow colors here

This is practically high fashion

Hair

Finished:

Around the same time, I managed to drop tiny Diamond from a decent height and scratch the paint in a few places,

so a repaint was clearly her destiny This time I even straightened the crooked sword, not only by boiling it in water but by putting it under a pack of tiles I decided to treat the hair the same way as on her big sister—a transparent rainbow :)

And the third big project, which had also been waiting for its time for ages: an original kit by Garage Whale, which I finished in a record three weeks by the standards of this past year. Now that's what I call a burst of inspiration!

I've realized that I want to move toward a “buy it, paint it” approach, because a long queue of kits is terribly demotivating. All the kits are cool and wanted, but I can't paint several at once; I need to focus all my excitement on one thing, and then I'll have inner harmony, satisfaction, and all the other nice things a hobby gives you. And once a kit isn't fresh out of the mail anymore and has been lying around for a while, it only gets harder to start... Or perhaps it's age and the emotionally draining daily grind of salaryman life creating this mood, where you'd rather spend your time lying on the sofa reading Reddit and tapping away at a mobile game than doing something productive that might stave off dementia.

What we have disassembled and assembled:

For stability, I drove longer pins deeper along her load-bearing axis; there are no fewer than three where she attaches to the base. The parts fit together beautifully, and not a drop of putty was used :) Phos's head also sits very securely in her hands and didn't need any extra reinforcement, which made me very happy.

Next came masks, masks, masks—there's no escaping them (once again I confirmed that liquid mask and my hands simply don't belong together).

The hair went from this to this. It wasn't easy to capture the rich blue-violet color of lapis lazuli.

Let's look and see how it's shaping up:

Just lying there, watching

More masks; this part was genuinely difficult

This is the final assembly, followed by gluing on the metal leaf one tiny piece at a time :)

And by the way, I didn't forget to bring my heroes together:

On the desk at night and during the day:

And here is the result :3

Those gorgeous legs, my god

Up close:

Lapis turned out to be such an inspiring project. Of course, I didn't get through it without stripping the paint a couple of times, but overall everything went like clockwork! I hope this momentum helps me finish another kit this year (maybe even two, wow) and write a couple of posts looking back at what I painted in 2023 :3

That's all from me. Thank you for reading!