Santa Claus will gun you right down!!

*whew* made it (tho truth be told, she was finished on Sunday and some of the regular visitors have already had a sneak peek). Here’s my festive project and, probably the last one I will do in 2009, Santa Hoihoi!!

I have read the manga, Watched the OVA and played the game (yes, there was an Ichigeki Sacchu hoihoi-san PS2 game) so when they announced the 1/1 Hoihoi model, there was no way I was going to miss out!
I had actually bought 2. The initial plan was to build one as-is and then mod the other into something else. My first choice was to mod her into Combat-San but since Kotobukiya announced a separate kit for her, that idea became redundant.
I had several ideas for mods, ranging from Marissa from touhou to Mahoro from Mahoromatic floating around my head at various points, but after tomopop announced their monthly megapixel thingy, I picked up my copy of the Hoihoi manga, read it again and found some inspiration.

This is the result!

The project wasn’t too hard at all. In fact, the initial build was incredibly easy. Hoihoi took me just over an hour to put together, and that’s really fast! I can’t even do 1/144 gunpla that fast! well, not quite that fast…

Here are all the parts laid out. Unlike other Kotobukiya kits (SRW and Armoured core models, I’m looking at you!) there were no stupidly small parts which you could easily lose if you weren’t careful so I was able to go all out with the initial build.

Unfortunately, all the weapons required painting so Hoihoi borrowed Nieto no Shana for the above pic!

After the initial build, came the interesting stuff. While reading the hoihoi manga again, I came across this page:

And once I read it, that was when I decided how I was going to mod my Hoihoi.

There was also a good one on the FG boards but the user actually sewed the costume for hoihoi. My sewing skills are, unfortunately, somewhat lacking (tho not nonexistant!) so I had to make a few concessions and go via another route to make my santa hoihoi!

Using the masses of sculpey I still have lying around, I fashioned a cape around the neck and, using the antannae as a base, crafted the hat in a similar style to what was seen in the manga. Each antanna is housed in one of the “horns” of the hat. I also added sculpey to certain areas around the skirt and gloves. The idea was to raise the areas to make it easier to paint them white and add stuff later on. Then, disaster struck.

The sculpey required baking to make it solid so I chose to put the parts in the oven while still on hoihoi. I had tested the temperatures with spare plastic bits prior and saw no adverse effects on them. It’s just a shame that the same couldn’t be said of hoihoi herself. The parts didn’t melt but some warped badly and made her unuseable. I had effectively killed Hoihoi!!

On the plus side, the extra parts came out unscathed and held their shape. The hat also had an extra bonus in that the antannae parts were fine so I could simply put the hat onto a different Hoihoi. So there went my second one. I am now without a regular Hoihoi-san in my collection. I guess that gives me a reason to get the heavy weapons version but I hate the colourscheme…

Here’s how the hair ended up. It kept it’s overall shape but you can see where various sections warped due to the heat. Couldn’t really use it after that…

With a new body ready in about an hour, All that was left was a change in colourscheme. Being unable to cook Hoihoi meant that I had to abandon the idea of having sculpey to raise certain areas so I just painted them white in the pic above.

With the white areas painted, I stuck cotton wool to the white areas to give them the needed “fluffy” look. The hat was given the same treatment.

For the little balls on her neck, I put 2 blobs of sculpey on the ends of a piece of elastic string and then tied a bow on her neck, over the cape. The sculpey was painted white and more cotton wool was added all over.
One thing you can’t see tho (luckily) are the fingerprints I left all over the hat and cape. I’ve got a long way to go before I can say that I can sculpt stuff. Making something one can sell at Wonderfestival is a distant illusion at this point.

I actually did a bad schoolboy error when making the cape and forgot to check to see if the hair on Hoihoi actually got in the way, but luckily, I was able to turn the hair up enough to make sure that the 2 don’t interfere with eachother.

The one concession I made with the mod was that I was unable to give Hoihoi any sleeves as I couldn’t find a way to make one while keeping the articulation. I could have painted them red, but that would simply have looked awkward with the oversized hands so I chose to keep them skin coloured. At this point, some of Combat-Sans parts would have been useful. In fact, the process would have been many times easier with combat-san providing extra parts, but there’s no point in thinking about that now, since she’s not due for release until March.

The final extras were the gun included with the kit, which was painted in a simple black and white scheme and the sack. How can you have a santa without a sack???

The sack was easy. I cut a square sheet from an old handkerchief, put some cotton wool in the middle and tied the corners together with string. The sack was then tied to Hoihois hand with yet more string.

I have to rest the sack on her hair, otherwise it would simply hang on the side…

And because she’s santa, here’s a pic of her delivering an early christmas present. I finally picked up my copy of Otacool from a friend of mine who was in Japan around the time of it’s release. I just didn’t find the time to meet with her to pick it up until yesterday, when we went to see Avatar as a group. Plot was terrible but the world and the characters were really impressive!

And that’s probably it for 2009. Since it’s christmas, I don’t know if I’ll keep up with blogging until after the holidays but Sheryl still needs to be completed and I have my missing parts for KOSMOS now, so I’ll definitely be back.
Have a great christmas readers and see you in 2010!!!