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Chitocerium

Monday, September 6th, 2021

It’s time for a new model kit. I don’t often do posts about kits these days, but this one is unusual:

It’s a tiny cat kit! This is one of several kits in a new line called Chitocerium, which apparently means ‘the protectors of the gates between worlds’. Yes it’s silly, but the kits are cool.

This kit is small and inexpensive (about $10) and all the pieces fit in the palm of your hand. It’s an easy one to build, but sandpapering down the flash was a little tricky due to the tiny scale. This segment for instance was made from 5 different pieces:

About a quarter of the total pieces in the kits are tails! There’s 8 to choose from; which one would you pick:

It took me only about ten minutes to assemble, and is very small but can be posed in many familiar cat poses. It’s an extraordinary kit for its size. Here it is next to a LEGO minifig;

As the box suggests this comes in two colours, and the line also includes some extraordinary figure kits of android girls (one of which I have). Given that this is a line from a company (Good Smile) not necessarily known for plastic model kits, I’m impressed.

Posted in Cats, Miscellaneous, Models, Otaku | Comments Closed

Bonsai!

Friday, July 16th, 2021

I got this as a gift:

It’s a candy kit to make an edible bonsai! Start by kneading the chocolate caramel to make it soft:

Gently fill the molds with the candy:

After a half hour in the freezer it had solidified:

While I was trimming the flash Kristin was cooking a green sponge cake. It was as easy as powder and water mixed together and microwaved. It looked… unusual:

But stone the crows it looked convincing when broken apart and placed onto the branches:

And here’s the finished product (which was about 2 inches tall):

Looks good enough to eat doesn’t it?

And we did! It wasn’t bad at all; basically chocolate caramel mixed with cake. Easily one of the best candy food kits I’ve ever made – or eaten 🙂

Posted in Crafts, Food, Models, Nature | Comments Closed

Ramen 6: Finale!

Monday, April 12th, 2021

And so we reach the final ramen post. But I’m not eating ramen today, I’m making it. Specifically, this:

It’s a plastic model kit of a ramen cup! This was made to commemorate 50 years of Cup Noodle and lest there be any doubt…

It’s not edible!

Here’s the contents:

As with all Bandai plastic kits the engineering is astonishing, and the pieces went together easily and almost seamlessly:

I particularly liked the lettering, which was made of plastic rather than used a sticker:

That’s not to say the kit had zero stickers. In fact it has a lot, but they’re easy to attach and make the finished product look incredibly lifelike:

Here’s a shot of the contents (pre-cooking, of course):

And here I faced a choice. Display it with the contents showing, or attach the lid? I chose the latter, and the contents of my cup will therefore be sealed away forever.

Here’s a shot showing scale next to a toy car I just happened to have:

It’s a fantastic kit, and I’ll be keeping it on permanent display 🙂

Posted in Collecting, Crafts, Food, Models, Otaku | 2 Comments »

Castle Grayskull

Sunday, September 27th, 2020

Today I finished building this:

It’s a 3500 piece model of Castle Grayskull from Masters Of The Universe. It looks like LEGO but it’s actually ‘Mega Construx’, which is a LEGO ~~ripoff~~ competitor. The kit came out for $250 but I got it for quite a bit less on Amazon, both because I love the design and because the reviews were overwhelmingly positive.

The packaging is beautiful and opening the massive (and heavy!) box revealed lovely art and a fantastic manual. The 50+ bags of pieces are separated into four smaller boxes each with their own art, and the entire thing screamed quality.

The kit was built in five parts, each of which took 2-3 hours. It wasn’t a trivial build, but not as challenging as the more complex LEGO technic kits. However the mega construx pieces are slightly lower quality than LEGO and occasionally were difficult to actually push together! As a result it was physically more difficult to make this set than your average LEGO kit 🙂

There’s also the occasional bit of molding flash visible (as you can see above) and the manufacturing of the pieces isn’t as perfect as LEGO, but overall I was extremely impressed with how well the set was designed and went together. I had routinely dismissed LEGO competitors before making this kit, but now I’ll have to keep my eyes open in case anything else of this quality is released.

That’s the front of the finished castle…

And that is the back. Note the curved walls and roof, and the 100+ individual little brown pieces used for roof tiles. It’s a tall kit, very sturdy and heavy. I feel if I dropped it it would hardly break!

Of course it opens and has massive amounts of ‘play features’ including several doors, a jail cell (with creepy inhabitant), a moving throne, a cannon, ladder, moving lift etc. It came with six minifigs (and I bought a few extras myself) which are a good LEGO-scale equivalent of the original guys from the 1980s.

I’ve always loved LEGO castles and for many years have wished for a highly detailed and large kit (perhaps of Neuschwanstein) so when I saw this I bought it as much for it being a castle as the (cool!) MOTU origin.

It was great fun to build and looks wonderful up on my bookshelf. But there’s still a spot free if LEGO is inspired and finally releases a detailed castle of their own…

Posted in Crafts, Models, Retro, Toys | Comments Closed

My Mindflayer

Monday, August 10th, 2020

After great success several years ago, I thought it was time again for some fantasy miniature painting. So I bought myself – for only $5 – this dude:

It’s a 2 inch tall plastic model (by Reaper Miniatures) called D’Khul Bathalian. But if you’ve played D&D you’ll recognize this as a Mindflayer, an iconic evil octopoid-humanoid. As you can see the figure is astonishingly detailed for its size, and when painted professionally it looks mighty good as these examples show:

Obviously I wanted to paint mine to look as good as these, and reflecting back on my efforts from last time I considered any flaw in the final work due exclusively to my choice of paints. This time, rather than using free paint that came with a children’s magazine, I would invest in high quality tools. And so I did:

I purchased this set of premium acrylics for only $9, which I thought quite reasonable considering it came with three brushes! I’d never used acrylics before, but was sure I’d have no trouble due to my overall better-than-average artistic skills.

The figures don’t need primer, so you can just ~~slap on~~ apply the paint with little setup. Everyone knows mindflayers are purple so the first choice of colors was easy and shortly after I begun I knew a masterpiece was being made.

That’s a shot of my palette upon completion. I chose dark colors to evoke the evil of The Underdark and the bright whites and yellows were used for overbrushing (for detail) and the magic effects of the staff. I blended red and black to create a clotted-blood colour for his robe and the blue was used extremely sparingly (a few atoms only) to detail his medallion. In short my design was eclipsed only by my effort, and both resulted in a final work I’m immensely proud of:

Thoughts?

Posted in Art, Crafts, Models | 1 Comment »

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