Tutorial Custom Kiwami Hibiki Kurenai

So I bought a Tamashii Nation 2009 Autumn Lucky Draw exclusive KIWAMI Hibiki Kurenai just before Chinese New Year. Love it to bits so shiny and red like cherry haha. A friend of mine found out i have one and he kept asking me to sell it to him which i wont ;p So i did the next best thing, I custom one and sold it to him for RM55 (with his knowledge that its a custom of course ;D).

Its a very simple custom but certain steps and precautions still need to be maintained and i will share it with you here :)

1) First step; use a hairdryer and blow the figure for 20 seconds, pull out all the joints as seen below. Pls be gentle especially for the elbow joints.

2) Sand the entire figure to prepare it for painting. Please be careful with the knee and elbow joints while sanding it.

3) Normally i would have sprayed the figure with a primer layer but i didnt this time. The reason being primer will clog up the elbow and knee joints making it more susceptible to breakage. So I skipped the primer layer and straight away paint a Mr Color super metallic silver layer over the whole figure EXCEPT for his knee and elbow joints. I did this twice i.e. 2 layers of silver to make sure its very shiny.The silver layers will make the next layer shines a lot better.

4) Repaint the eyes, belt and the top of his head right below his demon head crest matt black.

5) I test my clear red/ slightly orange paint mixture (i mix clear red with a bit of clear orange together) to see if its similar to the original kiwami hibiki kurenai by painting it on the head first and compare it to the real hibiki kurenai. Looks good so i continued with that mix for the entire body ;p

 6) I also painted the lines on his stick metallic silver

7) After the clear red/orange layer dried. I then use metallic silver paint to touch up any overlap clear red paint.

8) For the elbow and knee joints, I used matt red to color over them in just one thin layer so that the paint wont clog up the joints and make it susceptible to breakage when you move them.

9) Spray a layer of gloss top coat over the figure to protect the paint.

MAKE SURE TO ALLOW EACH LAYER OF PAINT TO DRY PROPERLY BEFORE ADDING THE NEXT!!

Well thats about all you need to do to make your own KIWAMI hibiki kurenai :) simple just need a lot of patience to paint it properly :)

Please enjoy the rest of the photo gallery

Here you can see the custom hibiki kurenai with the original hibiki :)

Here is a comparison between the custom and the real thing. The one on the right is the real one ;)