Build process: Pokepla Koraidon

Hello zesterinos! I have another gundam post in the pipeline but am waiting for good weather to do topcoating before I consider it done. While waiting, my brother bought me a pokemon plamo kit in Japan. While pokemon plamo are not not my main interest now, they were what got me into this hobby. Pokemon kits are a lot less complex and don't require tools to build, but I try to use tools as far as possible to practice building techniques on them.

TOOLS

-Stedi MS-104 nipper

-mr cement

-dspiae siren glass file

-craft knife

-tweezera

-StyleX precut sanding paper

-Dspiae siren glass file

-Dspiae markers: white, black, red, gold, metallic red

CUTTING

For pokepla kits, you can just break the pieces off the runners. However they can leave nub marks. Since I have the tools, I decided to cut them off. Also since these kits tend to have relatively few parts compared to gunpla, no sorting is required.

CEMENTING

Many pokemon kits have seam lines that can benefit from being sealed up. Idk if it's just me, but in previous attempts, applying cement did not melt the 2 pieces of plastic together. Instead, it distorts the plastic around the seam line. Not all the seam lines were properly closed, but I managed to seal some. The trick here is to make sure the cement is applied on the part where the plastics are going to touch. Let it sit for a few seconds, then squeeze the 2 parts together.

The next part is sanding. The seam lines are all found of bright red, or very dark grey parts. The bright red was surprisingly forgiving (but still visable) towards sanding, perhaps because it's not that dark. The grey on the other hand...

Also in my previous build I accidently spilled the cement all over my work table so this time, I put the bottle in a container so that all the spillage would get captured if it happened. Fortunately I did not knock over the bottle again.

PAINTING

Pokemon kits tend to have a lot of stickers, not just to make up for finer details in colour correction, but also to cover up hollow parts. But this... it made me want to buy more markers because there was a second sheet dedicated to the colour gradient from blue to pink. These stickers are huge, and I made a lot of mistakes sticking them.

The stickers which I could paint instead, I tried. Idk if it's just my white marker or that's just the ink, but my white marker's ink does not level as well. Even after multiple coats, parts still appear uneven. The final product still looks ok from a distance tho.

The eyes were a pleasant surprise. I didn't have anything close to the brown and yellow that the stickers had. But I tried substituting it with metallic red and gold. Probably not accutate, but it pops quite well.

Tips for painting:

-mask the area first. Paint spilled over in a lot of places due to careless brush strokes (Dspiae markers are on the thicker side after all).

-sand the surface before painting. A rougher surface makes it easier for the ink to stick to the plastic. It helped a little with the white ink.

FINAL PRODUCT

This kit is much bigger than other pokepla, and even 1/144 scale gundam kits. Tbh I'm impressed, because I've seen smaller pokepla sell for more higher prices than this. It definitely has the shelf presence, but the way its body is spread out and how there's limited articulation, it will inevitably occupy a lot of space.