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Preface
In Japan, there is a tried and tested line of kid's products called candy toys. They are smaller budget-level toys that come with candy. Stemming from this is something called "Minipla", which means miniature plastic model kits.

Super Sentai is a huge property in Japan, with nearly 4 decades of uninterrupted programming and merchandise. One sticking point among its fans is that the large DX toylines of robots tend to always be very big bricks. Ever since a few years ago, Bandai's minipla designers decided to take the Super Sentai candy toys a step further, and design the minipla kits to be exponentially more posable than their DX brothers. The downside is that you have to build them, they generally are cast in -very- few plastic colours, and rely more on (admittedly well-designed) sticker sheets for detail.

However! There is a lot of good sculpting in these kits, especially given their Japanese pricepoint of around 300yen per component box (with a given robot consisting of 3-5 of those boxes).

I've been into these for a while, and decided to try posting the latest kit I finished up.  



The gist of what I did was break out a bunch of Gundam markers and work on this while listening to some internet entertainment. I did a few spots of brushwork and toothpickwork, but generally I wasn't aiming at a very high bar.  



While I didn't do a basecoat, it's worth pointing out the plastic colours I was working over. The arms were solid white, the dragon was solid red w/ a yellow underbelly/feet/forehead horn, the snake was black and white, and the tiger was solid yellow with black tread plates on the sides.




Some of my better screw-ups included painting the whole shark blue and forgetting to undercoat with black before starting to paint the body's silver parts, and forgetting to paint the yellow-plastic tread parts on the tiger until after I'd finished clearcoating.  




One really fortunate thing is that all those connection points that I painted black have been designed such that none of the "headers" actually rub against the outer part when connected.



Moving on to the separate modes...

 

The biggest job out of all of these was easily the shark, since he was solid white plastic. I also had to do some awfully amateur freehanding for the pink stripe on the top of the phoenix head. The dragon had a lot of stuff added to him too, though.




Mainly, his entire underbelly and feet were yellow plastic, and...there's no yellow that's supposed to be there.  



I also wanted to line the crevices of his wings to break up the red a bit more.



While most of the gold-line detail was sculpted on, there was a missing bare batch on the front of his chest. It bugged me, so I did a really haphazard job with my knife and cut the straight-to-curved shape on there, then filled it in with gold. I tried to add a bit of black to the edges, in part to cover for a mis-cut.  




As part of the "header" gimmick for the series, the vehicle's heads are all supposed to be able to fly around on their own. Each one has an opening mouth, which did help me paint some of the pointier teeth.




I only really did full-on interior work on the dragon and shark mouths. The shark has a clip piece inside to hold the sword, so I opted to leave it unpainted. One bit of poor planning was that I should have sanded down the pegs in the jaw hinges. Now, the mouths are pretty tight to move, and I have to grip them mostly by painted parts.

That and there was one unfortunate incident right after I shot a video about the paintwork...

 

Unfortunately, one side of the shark's jaw cracked and sort of disintegrated.  

I think it may have been due to the layers of paint and clearcoat shrinking slightly after they dried, combined with the pressures of being a socket for one side of the jaw joint. Do I have my sciences correct here?



And to top it off, I couldn't get the piece that fell off to fit back in flush. I glued it in as best as I could without locking the joint itself, then laid a small bit of glue down over the hairline cracks, and spread it inside where possible.



It was pretty frustrating, but hopefully it won't get worse. D:

Thanks for having a look at my doofy little model, if you made it this far!  

 

Thanks for the comments, everyone!  

Generally I'm happy with what I have, but I might have another go at the kit when the reissue set w/ Gosei Wonder comes out (at least to have a better looking shark  ).

I am a man of Dak persuasion!

Yeah the first time I tried simply panel lining one of these kits, it astounded me how much sculpting went into the things.  

Eventually! I also have a quick video coming together that'll show what I painted. I wanted to show the act of painting too, but I couldn't come up with a workable set-up for that yet.

Oh man, a dissolving arm would make me twitch. D:

I plan to!