7th Dragon Mage - Sanding and Test-fitting

Hello everyone! I meant to post this before school started but lost the motivation halfway through and had a half-completed blog post for almost a month...well today I'm feeling really motivated for some reason so I decided to post what kit I've been up to and what is now sitting in pieces on my desk

This cute kit was painted by an artist named Ken - and on the other side is the official artwork

More pictures and details under the gap since they are quite large and lag my main page ↓

I have no idea who this character is except that she's a Mage from a DS game called 7th Dragon. It seemed pretty popular a couple of years ago and a couple of GKs and trading figures came out for it. I am not sure if 7th Dragon 2020 is a spinoff of this game or if it's even related but that game has some impressive PVCs including Max Factory's Hatsune Miku and Samurai.

I've always liked this kit since she feels very royal and she is also pretty small which is an added plus. When standing from her boots to the top of her ears she's around ~14cm. I think the color scheme of this character is very pretty but I also want to do something different like I did for Nostradamus...I just can't decide what to pick :/ I was thinking about picking a palette of black/reds/gold but I also like the idea of painting her with navy and dark purples. It's easier to decide once the kit comes together though ^^; Unfortunately she is an E cast...there's a lot I could say about that but I'd prefer not to start a recast vs. original topic in this blog post (that's part of why I didn't post earlier too) so maybe I'll talk about it sometime later.

For now here are some pictures during the building process...I've kind of only sanded some stuff and did some pinning so it's not too exciting :/ Some of the details on her coat broke off too which sucks because the pieces are really small so I've either got to glue them or fit a very thin wire through the broken part.

Detail that broke off -_-

There are also some nicks in the resin that will require puttying

For the most part it's a pretty clean cast. One thing that's really nice is that the parts fit really well. Even when I was just test fitting I didn't have anything that was obviously misaligned or needed heating. The sculptor was also very sneaky for the most part and worked the angles so you wouldn't need to putty a lot of seams. At this point most of the pieces have been sanded down so my next step will be to give her a lovely Simple Green bath and then putty some nicks and scratches.

I'm not sure when I'll get a chance to do some more work on this Mage due to school but hopefully it will be soon! Maybe I'll drop this one and start working on a little Halloween kit I have for next month, who knows :3 Thank you for reading!