With my Sci-fi entry behind me I can turn my attention 100% to this build. First up is the, um, diving bell? I dunno, the place where the scientists sit and look at the fishies. I'll be skipping th edivers, I might come back and add them someday, but for now I'm going for the underwater look and I think they'd be having a hard time a mile under water...
The sphere is made to be opened if you like, in fact the whole kit is built in layers allowing you to strip it down to show the mechanics. This leads to one problem, without gluing the bell it isn't a perfect fit. More on that in a moment.
Interesting side note, each runner has a sea creature printed into it somewhere:
Crabs, fish, bugs, you name it. Cool detail. I suppose you could use them as a casting mold if you wanted to.
Need to assemble my scientists. I've never painted little 1/48 people before, so this should be fun.
My seat is rather uncomfortable, my good man...
After they were together and primed, I started in on the shell of the...cockpit?...with Stynylrez/Ultimate white:
While that dried I started brush painting my peeps with some Citadel Ultramarine blue, varying shades of black and brown for the hair (with one getting some drybrushed Tamiya XF-19 Sky Grey for some "salt-n'pepper" hair). Flesh was Citadel Dwarf Flesh because ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Once that was done I added some preshading to the shell with some Tamiya XF-54 Dark Sea Grey--ultramarine, sea grey, sensing a theme?
Is it me or does everything on this kit seem to have a face?
These were covered in Tamiya XF-2 White. I think I might go for Mr Color white for the exterior, the Tamiya white, while nice looking, is finicky.
Next up was to paint the interior and decal the controls. I could have, and probably should have, painted them. The details are excellent and well defined, but I'm just not confident in my tiny detail painting skills...and I've never encountered Bandai decals before so I was eager to see how they were. A few canisters, emergency floats, and the like were painted.
Instrument cabinets were done with Tamiya XF-71 Cockpit Green, while the seating cushion was just XF-5 Flat Green. The decals are still settling here, but more on them below.
The decals were alright, if a bit on the thick side. The main problem came from a couple of the smaller decals, for example the speakers. The raised details are so sharp and well done the decal has no chance of ever conforming well. I should have painted. Oh well. Most of the others aside from that stuck down well and conformed after some MicroSet/Sol treatments. A couple needed to be trimmed up as they had way too much carrier film surrounding the prints. The color difference between the decal green and the paint doesn't bother me, it's just some panels I reasoned, they could be made with different paints from the cabinetry. Still, maybe if I had painted them...
Time to fit these poor souls together. I gave them each a touch of Vallejo Game Color 72.019 Night Blue to add some shadowing to their uniforms and some Vallejo Modoel Color 70.951 White for the uniform piping. CA was used to fix them into place, applied with a toothpick (the decals are starting to conform better):
View ports assembled with some glass, and the shell is put together with the consoles, and the intrepid souls are about to be sealed up:
Bye-bye! See you later...
As you can see the bell doesn't really fit totally snug, without some glue it'll be a bit wonky. I'm hoping this doesn't repeat with the hull, Bandai is usually much better than this. Then again maybe it needs to be loose so you don't break the bell trying to open it later if you want to strip off the shell to view the mechanics. We shall see, LED wiring and inner mechanics are up next.
