Here are some in-progress pictures of a figure kit I'm building. She is Hayane Fubuki (Urayukihime) from the Shining Hearts game. You can find the official info on her character here, in Japanese. And here are several pictures of a pre-built version of this kit. According to the game, Hayane is 163cm tall which works out to 5'4", so the kit works out to about 1:8 scale.

If you're just interested in the final product, she's at the end of this page.

Click each thumbnail to see picture and caption. Click the picture there to see full-resolution image.

I'll start with some official pictures of Hayane and some of the kit parts.

The first step is to clean the pour-gates and flash off the parts (thankfully this kit was cleanly molded with little flash) and dry-fit the parts together. As part of the dry fitting I also installed brass pins in many of the joints. These not only make the joints stronger, but help hold things together temporarily for photos like this. There's still plenty of work left to do, and I didn't temporarily attach any of the bows on her outfit for these pictures.

While not necessarily being the next required step, I took the opportunity to borrow a friend to help pick out paints for Hayane. Here's samples of what we picked out.

Also this is the stage to start giving the coats a first coat of primer. In addition to providing a good basis for the final paint, the primer shows where we need to do more cleanup of the parts.

Now we begin actual painting and assembly.

Some real progress

"Is my butt to big for this skirt?"

"I'm sorry, Hayane, it seems the way I finished your hip joints made it so."

Hayane is finally starting to come toether. The Ice Base, her cloak, skirt, etc. Here I've dry-fitted a lot of the pieces, to see how she looks. We can also see there's plenty of touch-up and finishing to do (not to mention adding her ribbons).

This is the main work on the base. The ice crystals she's running over are cast in clear resin. I painted them "clear blue" and thyen misted "snow and ice" over the top to give it a wintry feel.

Hayane is pretty much together except for her sword and touching up the last places that need it. Hopefully these pictures don't show up anything drastic that needs to be fixed. The black base-plate is now gloss instead of flat, which looks better to me.

Hayane finally got it all together, including her sword. Here are some shots to see see where I need to touch up before applying the final protective clear coat. Yes, if you look closely one side of the bow on her head is a little different than in previous pictures. An accident broke one side of it off and sent it flying to places unknown, so I had to make up another from scap plastic. Hopefully it's not too noticable.

Now we've finally got Hayane all glued together with the little bits I found touched up, a protective clear flat coat applied, and glued down to her base for safe-keeping. The full-resolution pictures may be larger than life size on your monitor, as this kit only stands about 8" tall.