This is a very nice 1/6 resin figures of the famous or infamous Fantasy character Red Sonja.  She first appeared in Conan novels and comic books.  The popularity of this character spawned a motion picture of the same title, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Brigitte Nielsen.  She was one of the Conan female characters that was on equal footing with Conan.  IT was nice to see that someone finally made a full figure of this great Femme Fatale!

CONSTRUCTION

 

The construction is rather straight forward in this kit since the moldings are of such high quality.  There was a minimal of filling and sanding in the construction of Red Sonja.  Once the figures was assembled and cleaned up, it was primed with Armory gray primer.  I used a dual action airbrush (Iwata) to paint the main parts of this kit.  I used Badger Freak Flex airbrush acrylic paint line along with Tamiya and Vallejo acrylics.  These paints work and blend well together for the airbrush format.  The only areas I hand painted were the details in the face and various weapons she wore.  I went for a suntanned color for the base flesh tones and did the highlights with lighter shades of flesh and white pastels.  I also did the same for the shaded areas.  It is better to start with darker base and build lighter shades over it.  The airbrush technique uses many light coats of nearly translucent paint.  The blend is usually 50/50 paint and thinner.  This makes it easier to blend each successive layer without heavy demarcation lines and it is also easy to cover up any mistakes.  Once all was completed I sealed in everything with Testors Glosscoat.  

 

The armor (what little she wears) and weapons were painted with Tamiya acrylics.  The Dragon was finished in Tamiya acrylics after the base colors were airbrushed.  The dragon was painted a basic green and then washed over with a Black-Green mix.  I then dry-brushed the scales with a light green blended with white.  Once all was painted to my satisfaction I sealed the whole figure in a Testors Dullcoat.  The base was done with playbox sand glued to the resin base with Elmers white glue.  The resin base then was attached to a store (at Michaels Crafts stores) bought wooden base.  These are pretty cheap and easy to stain and polyurathane.

CONCLUSIONS

 

The construction on this kit is rather straight forward.  The majority of time ,of course is spent painting, and in this case I employed an airbrush for the bulk of the painting and shading.  The details were hand painted, but a figure in this scale is best airbrushed.  I used some pastels for final shading but the major fleshtones were airbrushed.   The subject matter is a nice break from all the military subjects I usually model (aircraft and figures).  It is too bad that this kit is out of production, since the castings are of excellent quality and the pose is quite striking. 

June 2004