Review Tuesday: Shinsengumi - From MJ Miniatures

Euro Militaire is over. A weekend has past since. And life is beginning to get back to normal ( aside from the weekend at UKGK.. to come later! ).

And with life returning to normal, we can begin to get back to reviewing some of the goodies that I have picked up from the various events once more!

For this one, we have Shinsengumi, Wolves of Mibu 1864. A Samurai with quite a history it seems, but quite a colorful character that has just taken out something or someone based on the blood splatter shown on his sleeves!

I had the chance to chat with the sculptor at Euro about it. Dae Hyeong has quite a passion for history and military pieces, and we can expect many more of these from him in the future. I was hoping to chat with Man Jin about the paint job, but that will have to wait until Scale Model Challenge in Eindhoven when he appears there instead :) Should be an interesting discussion to understand more about how he worked on this, and got some of the texture into it.

You can really be pulled in from the artwork of a piece though. Really impressive there and makes you just wish to jump into painting it. Let's see if the resin copy still pulls you in when looking at it directly.

Opening the box, there is no foam, but you can see the pieces packed within the bubble wrap here. Separated into many pieces here due to the complexity of the piece it seems as well!

We can see a lot of aspects of it here. The mass of the body is a single piece, which is good, and it is well cast. Very little mold lines, and no flash on it.

Hands, arms, head, and even some of the ribbons are all separate! Having a quick look at the arms, we see it is a perfect fit. So with a bit of cleaning up of the resin vent overflow sections we can see that this will piece together quite nicely.

The only point that was bad was that the sword itself was bent.

Like seriously bent. At least it was not snapped off, I would see this as being much worse. With it being so bent, it can tell me that the resin is more flexible ( a good thing ) and should be a bit more durable for shows when people accidentally bump into things.

So this will get some hairdryer, hot water treatment to bring it back into shape. And I suspect that I will give the entire things a massive soapy bath as it is a bit oily in spots.

Overall I am quite happy with the pieces, and the minor things to fix above should be easy for intermediate to expert painters. I say this because I see this piece being for higher end painters. Beginners might struggle with it a bit more than they would like to admit.

All I do know is that I will need to raise my freehand-fu for this piece as it is required with all those flat sections available. And the history of the piece being one that was ripe with floral patterns and such elaborate designs on their high end clothing. Lots of swearing in my future for that, but let's see how I get on with it :D

More to come.. but a good buy for me in the end, even without the nice discount that was available at Euro :) Until the next one :)