I've been wanting to paint something in pink for a while now, but aside from perhaps the Infinite Justice, I couldn't decide what else might look good. Then I picked up the Astraea Type F and it looked perfect for a pink-build!

The kit itself was very easy to put together. Not a whole lot of seams or masking involved when painting. The parts fit is perfect as usual with Bandai kits. This kit comes with all the things that the other Astraea comes with, but has extra parts for the "mask".

The worst part of the kit was the rubber parts for the panels in the arms, legs, and "kidneys". I replaced those with ribbed styrene sheet.

Ironically the most difficult part of this kit was getting a good pink color. I prefer Tamiya Acrylics and there was just no mixes that I could find that came out vivid enough. So I decided to seek out some Magenta Pigment in order to tint some flat white to the shade I need. Well, apparently Magenta Pigment isn't cheap so I went to Michaels to have a look around.

I found some PearlEx pigment sets, and Series 2 had just the color I wanted. Unfortunately (or so I thought) it had a pearescent sheen to it. I decided to get it anyway and work with it. It ended up working perfectly and the pearl sheen was really minimized when mixed with the flat white. I mixed enough pigment with my white to get the desired color and did a test spray. It went on a little thick and lumpy, but thinning it much more fixed that. The end result was the perfect color. In fact, I also have a pearl cyan and yellow that I could potentially use to make any color I want via CMYK values.

Another benefit of the pearl powders was in doing a color-shift GN-Particle effect to the clear parts and lenses. To achieve this I sprayed the back of the clear parts with Future + Green PearlEx, then I added blue pearlEx to that and sprayed the back-side again, finally I added clear green Tamiya to that and gave it a final spray. Then dip it in future to give it a nice gloss and place it over Alclad Chrome painted internals for the full effect. The end result is fantastic and unfortunately much better looking in person. Almost gem-like.