I reached out to my sister for gift idea help, and she said that she was very into the Final Fantasy series of games. I know all of three things about the Final Fantasy series, but two of those things are Moogles and Chocobos, and so that gave me a starting point for her gift this year. Shinokez’ Chocobo and Moogle patterns also really jumped out at me from a stylistic point of view, since I really liked the idea of painting both of these in a “plush” style. Resin3DInteractive brought the models to life, and I got to work.

As much as these were a gift for my sister, they were also kind of a gift to me because they were a lot of surface area for me to do a lot of experimenting with. I needed work on white tones, yellow tones, sponging, and on doing things like wet blending and transitioning between red tones, and these gave me a lot of practice on all of the above. This is also one of the first sets of models where I got to play with Hardcoat, which I’ve recently added to my paint supplies, and I found it much easier to work with and apply than other gloss varnishes I’ve used before. Credit where credit is due, GW.

I was very happy in the end with the models and how they turned out, especially the baseball-Moogle. The Chocobo really only reinforces my new love of Averland Sunset and Yriel Yellow, and I got to try so many sponge sizes and types on these models that I feel like these were definitely worth doing, if only for all that practice. Hopefully, my sister will like the end result.