Ice Mutt

Ah ShenX Tech, Shenxing Azure Dragon... you were looked forward to and such a disappointment. I feel kind of terrible for this guy. The box was absolutely huge and was a priority this year because frankly, I could fit about four girl kits in the space it was taking up on my backlog.

He took me from early February through May until I was done with him. It started with me making bins of all the pieces needed for each of his identical 20 body pieces (only the head, tail area, and leg-attach spaces are different) and working on cutting, sanding, cleaning, and assembling them like a one person assembly line. It took weeks. And the plastic felt awful, of all the kits I did this year this kit's chunky plastic was about as annoying as Apex, but at least Apex has significantly fewer parts and connection points to deal with. Every time I pushed pieces together, my fingers ached from all the spikes and points and the sheer pressure needed to put him together. In the end, the pegs holding on the leg joints are so small and bad that any amount of posing just pops them off. He's spent the time since just in a box instead of on display. Absolute waste of a fantastic design. It completely felt like it'd been designed in a virtual space and no one had put together samples of it and really put it through it's paces when it was done. I really wanted to have fun posing him with some of my other kits and the joints fall off at the smallest touch.

Just an absolute misery time of a kit, and I worked on it daily to get it done. I can't advise this guy unless you're either really into difficult to build kits or REALLY into dragons. And I mean REALLY into them, enough to get past the utter misery that was this guy.

Biggest disappointment for me this year.

The start of 2022 had me working on Tamamo-no-mae kit as well as using spare parts from my Road Runner's unarmored parts, the parts I wasn't using from the Tamamo-no-mae kit, and the color-D option parts (namely the alternate hip build). I was super glad to have these girls, they took me from December 2021 into January 2022, with my alt-RR being one of my favorite kits to pose due to her lack of random parts all over, and Tamamo-no-mae being where I decided that I just didn't care for a lot of the armor pieces that came with her and just using the parts I liked. They work well as a pair here, having similar color schemes (skintone D, the greys and whites) and a little bit of their own differences. The Alnair Staff also just looks great paired with the low-vis RR's teal hair.

Good bye, 2022, you were an interesting year! I have a lot to reflect on for the year, but it's easy to share what all I did this year in terms of kit building! I'll have some other posts with more detailed thoughts on some of these kits, and although my backlog is long, I always advise working at your own pace. Fourteen kits was a good number for me this year, though it feels a bit short considering me and the weather couldn't get on the same schedule to do much for painting or waterslides - hopefully will get some of these kits cleaned up with those in the spring!

Susanowo is my current in-progress kit!

I get way too tangled up over thinking what to start new blogs with. Take a look at my contest girl from the USA Gundam Store (USAGS) Mecha Musume contest this summer/fall. My piece won first for the Beginners (no massive repaint) category!

Contests are always an interesting space to me, especially for hobbies with really niche audiences and a lot of creative energy. Den of Angels hasn't done their annual variety ABJD contests in a while (the last one was in 2019, they paused for Covid and have not returned to doing the contests). I was really excited to see a contest for the girlpla kits, as I'd just picked up a Bullet Knight Executioner Bride with the intent of mixing with a Jaeger Edelweiss kit I had on hand. The contest meant I actually did some light stretching of my ideas and hunted down the effect parts I wanted as well as really thinking about the overall look of the kit as I tinkered with it. Mainly I kept my color pallet very narrow, going mostly for the white/silver look that the Bride kit comes with, but adding it the black boots from the Edelweiss kit and some gold highlights to help blend the included yellows in. I'm really pleased with how she came together in the end. I'm excited to start mixing some other kits together now too!

I'll post more of my dolls for now and see about posting some game thoughts over on GazongaGames.