#12 - Sinon, from Sword Art Online 2: GGO

This figure started out a bit handicapped, because I did things a bit out of order long ago. You see, on my 10th figure, Yoko, I got really 'excited' and did the skin tones of several different figures, all at once. I thought I was being clever and efficient, but what I was actually doing was depriving future figures of much needed airbrush experience. I, still being new to airbrushing and the procedures around it, made three mistakes - and those mistakes I now have to live with for this figure and even the next few. Those mistakes were: I made the skin glossy, I got the color wrong, and I didn't shade the skin either. I also masked the skin portion of the legs long ago, and didn't do a great job, which was something I had to recover from.

So aside from those mistakes, which I've already discussed in previous posts, I still made a few new, large mistakes with this figure too.

I'll start with the largest mistake: trying to make a small amount of airbrush paint stretch enough to finish a job, when it's apparent it's going to be a close call. Really, so much effort put into a figure, just to get lazy about waiting to order more paint. What happened was that I was running low on white airbrush paint. I already knew that white was terribly thin, and took dozens of coats to get a solid white. That's why I often use a white primer instead of a white paint. Which is what I did as well. Ok, back up, let me start from the beginning. This is regarding the white on Sinon's jacket, and her scarf.

Firstly, the jackets is very crumpled up, making it hard for the masking tape to stick to it. This was always going to be something hard. Knowing it would take 20 layers of white paint to cover up the underlying green, I instead used two layers of a white primer first. And this, was actually ok. I should have just stopped there. But I was getting cocky at everything so far working very well - so I added a blue tint as shading on the white, like I've read online (but never done) before. Turns out, it looked pretty bad. I was hoping that I could cover it up with white paint, but after two coats, it became apparent that using the white airbrush paint would take forever. It's at this point, that I decided that blue looked really bad as a shade, so I change it to grey instead, meaning I had to start over with the white to cover it up. Again, after a few layers of white and little result, I was almost out of white paint. Instead of doing the smart things and just ordering more paint and sticking with the airbrush paint, I tried using a thin coat of primer again. I didn't think it would work, and it didn't. It forced me to completely cover all the shading I had just done. So that's two more layers of primer. I tried to keep it thin, in order to keep some shading, and in parts I succeeded, and on parts I failed.

Lesson 32: For white surfaces, use primer, not paint.

Lesson 33: When shading white surfaces, blue isn't always best. As well, since white is thinner, the shading you apply should be as light a color as is possible.

Lesson 34: Don't try to make paint stretch. Don't start a piece unless you are confident you can finish it with what you have.

After all this, it still didn't look nice, but it was presentable. But there were two other problems all this caused: first, after 4 layers of primer and 6 layers of paint, the white part of the jacket was about a millimeter thick, which is huge. The other problem caused, is that after painting this 10 times, mistakes in the masking tape accumulated to something pretty massive. In particular, the finish actually got under the tape better than the paint did and left some ugly impressions on the back of the jacket. These were hard to clean up.

Lesson 35: Finish can get under tape easier than paint. When applying finish, just be patient and apply very thin layers rather than trying to get it all done in one layer.

I also had some problems with the torso. First, it was just hard, because of all the straps. I initially tried to do it by hand, but it was really starting to look bad, so I ended up using airbrush anyways. But the damage was already done - the straps have 3D brush stroke marks all along them. Oh well.

Lesson 36: Don't paint by hand anything thicker than a brush width, unless it's small.

Other than those things, no other huge mistakes were made. Lots of success stories instead. What worked: painting the thighs (skin) by hand. Using lots of water, I was able to avoid the 'brush stroke marks' and keep the thighs smooth. What worked: same thing for fixing the green portions of the jacket which were 'infected' by the white paint mentioned earlier. I spent several attempts to find the right color, and I used lots of water to keep the paint smooth. What worked: painting the black lines on the jacket by hand. What worked: the eyes turned out to be everything I could hope for. The cast didn't have a well defined groove for the eyes, so I kind of had to find my own place for them. It took several attempts, but I took my time, did it over again, and things worked out well. I used some of the methods I learned from YouTube several figures ago, and once more, they served me well (basically, work my way from the outside to the inside).