WIP
The name of this custom should be obvious.
Wow, it’s been an entire year since I’ve done my last Nuke Matrix kit, and as always, I have so many thoughts on Mad Wolf so far, with high highs and low lows, that I don’t even know where to start.
Let’s begin simple—the primed color scheme: when she was first revealed with the snow backgrounds, I thought her primary color was gray, a bluish-gray even, but later pics showed light blue instead, and that’s how she ended up in the final product. When I got Wolf, I had the idea of painting her like Hibiki from Symphogear since they share quite a few similarities, but I decided to not go with it as replacing the blue with orange-yellow might’ve drowned out the gold and prism yellow accents. So priming her up was my move, and goddamn, I’m glad I wasn’t airbrushing this—the amount of blue parts is insane, that I was actually worried whether or not I was going to finish a full can of Tamiya Primer. I managed to not, but boy was the painting table full of clips and parts. I also primed the off-white with Tamiya Primer White, but damn, the tint didn’t look at all that different from OOB. Regardless, there was a lot of painting, but it was surprisingly the easiest part of the journey.
I gotta be honest with you, building Mad Wolf was not fun. I must’ve gotten too complacent with the ease of Bandai and Kotobukiya girlpla—Bandai’s 30MS doesn’t need much effort at all, and the most sanding you have to do in Koto kits are joints, nub marks, and removing seam/mold lines, with the occasional joint that can be left unsanded. I know Nuke Matrix kits take time and effort, but the hiccups of Mad Wolf’s construction almost caused me to wreak havoc. The use of PVC could not get any worse as the manual tells you to glue the hair pieces together and the gold claws to the hands. There are inconvenient undergate spots for miniscule gold pieces, while some bigger gold pieces have no undergates and leave pretty bad nub marks. The fitment on almost everything is tight, and it’s probably not helped by the fact that I did paint a large portion of this kit. But the unpainted gray inner frame parts also have absurdly tight fitment. The joints on the upper arm, leg and feet, oh my god I had to sand down at least a third of the damn joint so that the friction wasn’t so bad. And for some reason, I’m not sure if it was just me losing my grip since my lower half of my body had been sore from walking so much, but the plastic was just goddamn slippery, which parts would fall to the floor, and it would take forever to find since there are just so many tiny parts without extras provided in the chance of losing them forever. The armored limbs were just a giant pain in the ass to build overall, but to my surprise, the tail builds pretty well and simple for how layered it is.
On the contrary, once Wolf is all built up, she is solid af, and I do enjoy the monotone color scheme a lot. I like her base form much more than I anticipated, and I really like the white stockings that come as part of the first order bonus. With that and her flustered face, you get yourself a really cute gal to pair up with the very sharp animal-themed mecha one. By all means, her armored form slaps, and has a striking resemblance to the Gundam Barbatos Lupus Rex with the long arms and hind legs as her lower half. That being said, her armored form is short, so short that her base form is a smidgen taller than her. Her tail is enormous, but with the gold tip you can just cheat her balance by using it as a tripod. I’ve grown to like her mask, the cape, while a bit finicky to put on, adds a huge amount of flair, and on top of all of that, she has a lot of accessories to play around with. Nuke Matrix never fails to make their kits have so much playability, and unlike Yefuna, Mad Wolf is an absolute blast to pose… as long as you’re not putting her armored form up in the air with her tail. I haven’t even attempted it, and I’m too scared to try. I can’t forget to mention the dual bodies—which Mad Wolf can literally carry herself up without a problem. Gosh, there’s just so much to do posing these girls, that I’m saving the rest of my creativity once I get Wolf done.
Getting Wolf done is about to be another whole job itself—as I’m doing a flat topcoat as always, the prism yellow’s gotta get taken out, and I’m scared of disassembling her in the fear that something will snap. She is painted, so I’m gonna have to be extra careful with hand painting as if it smudges, it’s just game fucking over. She has a lot of surface detail, which means a lot of panel lining. The decals better not have fitment issues. I’m also gonna weather her up as well before her topcoat, and I’ll see how that goes. That’s about it for now, I’m super tired, and I’ll see you again with Mad Wolf in her true prime state!
Completed
This kit has been very strange. My experience modeling Mad Wolf has not been great to say at the least, but posing her up has been nothing but fun, which is odd, considering that it’s usually the experience being fun up to the final posing that kills any enjoyment I had with a kit, especially with mecha girls.
Anyway, Mad Wolf Prime is done, finished up with detail painting, panel lining, decaling, topcoat and for the first time, weathering on her armored form. My motivation to do all these touchups plummeted as time went on, but I persevered knowing that she’ll look really good and I could get back to posing her since I’d rather do that than actually working on her.
Let’s first start with the fact that I had to take off all the prism yellow out of the kit as I was going to topcoat her and I didn’t want to coat the effect—not as bad as I thought it would. It’s definitely quicker to take out everything than Susanowo Guren’s clear parts, but there’s a lot more uncertainty with Mad Wolf’s as I was unsure if a peg would snap or not due to the fitments being tighter than I’d like them to be. Luckily, nothing did break, and if it was near impossible to take out a clear part, then masking tape saved the day.
Detail painting wasn’t as bad as I thought either, but it’s where I got kinda lazy. I used 4 colors overall, Tamiya Metallic Gray, Tamiya Metallic Blue, Vallejo Light Red (Orange) and a gold marker that you can barely see. I used the gray the most, using it on the tail, shield and legs and the blue on a few spots. Where I got lazy was… being careful with my brush, as if something smudges over on an already painted part, it’s going to take a lot of finesse to clean that up. I didn’t bother doing either of that, which you may see especially with the blue.
Panel lining—there’s a lot of it, and I was using 3 used up pens interchangeably until I said fuck it and used a brand new pen to do the rest. While laziness took over my painting, procrastination took over panel lining. I would do a few spots until I would say, wow, I really don’t want to do this, and just spent the rest of my day lazing around. Then again, I just went back to uni this week, which has been nothing but hectic. I eventually finished panel lining, which I was then off to decaling.
Ah, it’s so nice to be working with Nuke Matrix decals again. These decals are superb, with Nuke Matrix finally getting their fitments just right and their quality just being out of this world. I don’t remember if it happened with their older kits, but as soon as the decals are soaked with water, they can come out of the sheet right away, which is bonkers. They can move around freely, they stay in place when you want them to stay in place, they are top tier indeed.
It was time to do something I haven’t really done in a mecha girl, let alone any kit I’ve done in a while. Considering how her manual shows her in a snowy environment, I thought about weathering her and giving her a few battle scratches. I pulled out a Tamiya weathering kit and put on weathering makeup… basically everywhere. I combined the orange rust and gun metal colors and tried to be as subtle as possible as I didn’t want to overdo it. I just pasted it wherever, I usually use the decals as a starting point, I put emphasis on her hands, feet and tail as they’re more likely to get worn out, and I went for the hair as well as it would be pretty damn weird if it was just nice and pristine. Her skin—I thought I did weather it ever so slightly but it looks like it disappeared by the time I took her photos.
As usual, I would then give her a topcoat without her prism yellow parts, and oh boy, the gold became quite orange, but that doesn’t surprise me too much considering that it happened to Yefuna when I topcoated her gold.
It was time for reassembly and of course it had to be a giant pain in the ass. Resassembling the prism yellow parts? It sucked, especially when trying to put the ones on the tail. The piece that connects the ankle armor to the foot snapped on me, which happened to someone else on the subreddit before, but super glue was there to save the day. Problem is that I used super glue with the piece attached to the foot, and when you leave it to dry after a couple of hours, the toe bend gets stuck, so I had to disassemble the foot, get the joint unstuck, but in the damn process, the part snapped out of the damn super glue. I had to do this all over again, but after that, it caused me no problems in the posing process.
Finally, it’s time for the fun part, and it was fun indeed. I finally utilized every weapon that Mad Wolf has, although her hammer is heavy as shit, and the spear undoes Mad Wolf’s tripod as it requires the end of her tail. As always, it was fun to come up with scenarios with both Wolf and Carolina, though I did a little oopsie where I forgot her backpack for most of the shots as you have to remove the backpack when you use her cape. Her thighs are also wrong, but I’m not changing that now. I’ll reiterate what I said last time, Carolina is very cute, and Wolf Prime is hella badass. I did use most her expressions on Carolina as I liked Wolf with her mask the most, but you can express her with body language instead.
Overall, like I said in the beginning, this was a rough experience to build and finish, but it was worth it to pose for her in the end. She’s a kit that’s overengineered as fuck, but once you got her built up, there’s not much to worry from there. By all means, I’m taking a goddamn break. I’ve done several large mecha girl projects within the span of a month, and this one definitely took the cake of being long and daunting. My journey of Mad Wolf, which I’ve wanted since it was first unveiled, finally comes to a closure. Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you whenever I find myself interested in doing another kit!
