Yay! She’s finished, and just in time too cos I’m off on holiday for a week after this! In any case, here’s the completed Charagumin Selvaria Bles from Valkyria Chronicles!
like most Charagumin kits, she’s actually very quick to build and paint once you get going and because the parts are (mostly) molded in the correct colour, you can actually get away with skipping the priming of the parts. The paint sticks pretty well so long as you clean the parts like you should.
I needed to put Selvaria on a base because she’s a tad too back heavy with her cape so she *can* stand on her own but will just as likely fall over given enough time. Not much to look at from this side view but you can see some of the minor details which were highlighted in the paintjob.
Back shot. The hair was a major sticking point near the endgame of this project as I felt that I wanted a lighter colour for the hair but making it too light would have destroyed the shading in the deeper parts of the hair. In the end, I tried to strike a balance but it’s more of an issue from the front view than at the back.
The other side view does a much better job at displaying the details on the kit. Details which would have been completely lost if you didn’t paint this thing. Why make a colour resin kit if you need to paint it anyway?
A closer look at some of the detailing on the kit. The legs took by far the longest time to complete since I had to paint those gold lines by hand and clean them up afterwards. There are still some rough edges but I think it looks good enough. You can only see the rough patches if you get in close. But all the gold parts on the legs had to be painted on. If you don’t paint it, you just get a solid dark grey colour for all the parts (that’s right, not even black!)
The red sleeves also needed the gold details to be painted on. This was even harder as it was a little difficult to tell which parts were elevated and needed to be gold compared to the bits which needed to stay red…
The underside of the cape also needed to be painted red or else it would be solid dark grey.
The sword is a bit of a weird one. It actually attaches to the red holster (which is a separate part) and then feeds into a small hole in the skirt to hold its position. However, it doesn’t hold it too well so it has a tendency to sag. The peg is also very small so using glue to hold it in place is not the best idea as it will just put more stress on the peg and make it more likely to break.
Unlike other Selvaria figures, this one doesn’t follow the RAITA design too much so we don’t have super low torpedo tits on this one. Sadly, that won’t be the case in the new 1/4 scale figure.
A closer look on the details on the chest and neck. Those parts were actually rather fun to do but ended up substantially hidden.
I haven’t actually stuck the upper torso to the body either, to make things easier if I ever need to move Selvaria but you can see how back heavy the figure is as the part actually leans enough to see a gap just under her cleavage. That’s all due to the cape, people!
And a close up on the face to finish. Again, I was lazy and used the decals provided with the kit for the eyes but you can see the shading on the hair a little better at this angle. I lightened it up a little more after I had completed the initial hair colour but you can still see some of the shading in the deeper parts of the hair.
Overall, I had a lot of fun with Selvaria, which was good because HomuHomu pretty much sucked all the fun out of building since the parts were in such bad shape. I originally took Selvaria on once I saw the 1/4 scale version Volks had in the works for over a year and I’ll be sure to do my best to get one of those when she’s released. However, I still fail to see the point of the charagumin line in terms of model kits. You need to do a serious amount of painting to make the kits look even remotely presentable so why go through the trouble of making them colour resin kits in the first place. They’re more expensive but don’t really provide any real point… Well, I still have 2 more charagumin kits in the shape of Shinguji Sakura and T-ELOS. Selvaria will join the list again but I need to decide on my next kit now. I’m currently leaning towards my Feito or possibly Bayonetta, but I have absolutely no space to put Bayonetta anywhere…
