Figures

"Embrace"

Loading Image...

I think this kit was released in the mid 90's. It's a 1/6th scale kit of a painting by Oscar Chiconi that had been featured on the cover of an issue of Heavy Metal magazine. It's a rendition of a female welder in the embrace of her latest creation. The kit itself was quite massive, having two complete figures and a fully detailed base. In addition, there were several wires included to attatch to the android and welding equipment. The pieces were bubble free, and had a minimum of clean-up required. There were several small pieces meant to replicate leather straps or drawstrings that were extremely fragile, and I ended up breaking all of them at least once each. I should have replaced them with lead foil, which would have been both stronger and poseable.

Though I had been using enamel paints for my scale models for years, I had decided to try different paints for my figure kits, and for this kit, I chose to use the left-over skin tone paints that I had purchased from Horizon for use on my Horus and Anubis kits. These paints were perfect in terms of color, but were very thick and shortly after using them on this kit, they pretty much dried to the point of uselessness. I had some problems with adhesion but nothing too bad. The girl was painted mostly with these skin tones, for obvious reasons, except for the white of her underwear and facial details. The paint went over the grey primer coat well, but was somewhat translucent. I used this to my advantage later on when building up lighter highlights on the girl. The white was liquitex titanium white applied in several very thin coats. This allowed me to achieve a "wet t-shirt" look, as I had no doubt that the environment would be quite hot (due to the welding, of course...). Unfortunately, some of the paint was smudged, and required some touch-up. I used a thin liner brush to hand paint her facial details, including the dark red lips. Her teeth were first painted white, then washed with a super thin black, then highlighted with white again. Gloves and leather overalls were painted with various liquitex browns. I gave the whole figure a thin coating of future floor polish to give it a light sheen. I hand painted her hair, as most of it would be under the leather hood.

Since the android was an all metal creation, I chose to go ahead and use the Testors enamels I knew so well. My familiarity with these paints allowed me to finish the big fellow in very short time. Gunmetal was the base coat, followed by a mix of gunmetal and silver, then pure silver highlights. Some areas received a bit of gold and copper for color. I chose to lightly airbrush Tamiya clear blue to give him a look that was slightly different from plain steel. More color was added in the shadows and joints, less on the highlighted areas.

The wires were attached as indicated in the directions, then some were taped together as shown on the box illustration. I have not yet finished this kit, as the welder's helmet is still not in place. It's in a small plastic bag in a slightly larger box with lots of bits that currently rests in a very big box in somebody's basement. Someday...

The base was painted black, then drybrushed with gunmetal and silver. The Heavy Metal name plate was hand painted blue, with the orange highlights. The metal cross in the background was painted silver, with transparent blue added later.