[Maid-san] [Recast] GuP Amaretto 1/12 scale garage kit

This is a 1/12 scale Amaretto garage kit from Girls und Panzer series.

I will be honest with you. I had no idea who this was until I googled. Even then, I didn’t have clear memories of seeing her.

https://gup.fandom.com/wiki/Amaretto

But she does show up in the anime few times. My big question was, though, how she ended up as a figure. I don’t recall her being popular or anything. Yet, here we are.

The reason she was made into a figure could be due to Ribbin warrior since she does have a far bigger role in the series than she had in the anime or manga. This is backed up by a fact that this figure carries an anti-tank rifle which Anzio uses on top of their CV33 tanks in tankathlon matches.

1/12 scale is a somewhat awkward scale as well. But it is close enough to 1/16 scale I use for Girls und Panzer stuff that I decided to give this a try.

Another puzzle is that I have no idea which circle it is from.
From GK’s website, https://www.shop2000.com.tw/GK-M/product/p35122555, it shows a Matsusaka box which I assume is the circle who originally made this kit. However, my google researched revealed not a thing about this circle.

All in all, this garage kit just came out of a blackhole.
But it is another GuP character and I will take whatever I get.

The last time I purchased a kit from GK was middle of 2019. I see that I’ve decided to spice things a bit. They are now sticking their brand logo on their boxes now.

The (recast) kit is sealed in an organized manner as well which is a clear improvement from how they used to pack stuff. This is probably for the better since I once experienced lack of parts when ordering from them.

Once I opened up a copied instruction from GK, that was when I realized who the original circle was behind the kit: Maid-san.
You can find this kit from Maid-san.com. However, the circle appears to be selling only in events/festivals.
They have some Girls und Pazer kits. None of them really triggers my interest though.

These are paints I am going to use. Hull red for hair. Black primer for her boots. The brown paint is for the crate. Gray is for her clothes. And the pinkish paint is for her skin.

As always, when I opened up the package, the first thing I did was washing them in warm soap water. This is to wash off any residue oil from molds. If you skip this part, there is a chance that whatever paint you try to use will simply bounce off resin surface.

Once done, I airbrushed skin first. I was mostly going to paint this by hand but skin must be airbrushed in my experience.

And you can see how carefully they packed tiny hair parts.

I decided to airbrush her body crudely and then do finishing touches with a brush manually. I gave the skin paint about 12 hours to dry and cure. It’s cured enough that the tape doesn’t damage paint.

I painted her hair parts by hand crudely. Once glued, I will paint the hair once again. Micro-sol is very important here when placing eye decals. Without it, eye decals never stick properly.

Almost done, bar some finishing touches on her hair and wrist.

Once done, I used matte varnish on the whole figure. This is especially useful for glossy eye decals to become matte and be a part of the whole figure instead of standing out under certain light angles.
Varnish dries fast enough in this application since the layer is paper thin. An hour is plenty.

A quick photo scene setup for the figure. The Tiger I is a 1/16 scale tank. She looks tad out of scale. I didn’t think 1/12 vs. 1/16 scale would make this much of difference.

Overall though, this is not a bad figure and the overall process was relatively easy. As always garage kits, improvisations are often required because manuals never explain things in full details and resin parts may not fit.

In my case, this is a recast kit, so a chance of mismatched parts or whatnot is higher. In this case though, all parts were a-okay until I got to her anti-tank rifle.
The manual wanted me to drill a hole in one of rifle parts and such, so I ignored the instruction and went ahead with my own by using common sense.

Above is a comparison photo between 1/16 scale figures (on left and right) and 1/12 scale in middle. Not sure whether this is a really 1/12 scale figure.

Height of 1/16 scale figures are between 9cm to 11cm. Amaretto’s height here is around 13cm according to my measurement, so I guess this really is a 1/12 scale figure.

She looks quite big still, weird.