Bandai Figure Rise Setsuna F Seiei Bust – 01

I’m making this Figure Rise bust of Setsuna to go with the PG Gundam Exia when I get round to it as it’s in my stash pile and will have clear armour panels. Now straight away yes I know they don’t need to be painted, but with having issues with stickers staying on round surfaces & their thickness and I want to try and give his hair some shading I’ll be painting mine.

Started on the head by fitting the rear of Setsuna’s hair and using very thin superglue tried to seal the gaps to help with the painting later on.

Fitted all the rest of the hair parts fort Setsuna’s head and filled the large gap at the front where his head starts to curl. I wanted to give his hair a more realistic look and put some shading in, so to do this I found that some old “track wash” normally used for armour models was a very close but a bit darker shade than the plastic and with it being thin also was translucent and allowed the original colour to come through a bit.

I just went round in small areas building up the shading and effect I wanted so that some of the inner surfaces were just a bit darker. I know from the picture below it isn’t very visible but when moved around you can see the subtle differences.

When I looked at the stickers for the collar of Setsuna’s uniform They looked very thick and I did try them out but no way could I live with the results so took them off & cleaned the part in preparation for painting. I painted the collar white then allowed it to dry. I am using 3 different shades of blue to try and match close to how it looks in the actual TV episodes and masked off the collar area before painting the blue area. As you can see below the work and time has paid off in my view.

Once the acrylic has cured fully I’ll put a small bit of panel lining in the parts of the uniform just to add a bit more depth to the parts.