Diver Ayame

This is Figure-Rise Standard Diver Ayame from Bandai. She is a character from Gundam Build Divers. 

Honestly, I think this is the last great Gundam girl series that Bandai made. The last one has been a disappointment.

Starting from the box art, Its got a cute picture of the main character. 

The instruction manual was simple with a basic picture as color guide. 

This kit includes a set of foil stickers and water slide decals. I love the fact that it includes a set of water slides for its eyes. The sticker they have been using does not work well and I hate painting eyes. This made my life a lot easier. 

Also includes a basic stand. Not great but not bad either. 

Here is what the kit looks like built straight out of the box without any stickers. 

The kit was easy to build. All the parts separated easily and nub marks were easy to clean. It took me about an hour and half to build to this point and that's with carefully cleaning each part. For such a cheap kit it looks great. The proportion is good with great emphasis on her breast. 

Her skirt does get in the way though. It is a two-part skirt and it really limits her leg movement. Still, the kit is cheap and I think it has just enough for what it is. 

To solve the problem I did shorten up her skirt. It helped a little but its weird design and pivot point gets in the way. It did bring up her sexiness level. 

Here is what the kit looks like after painting it. 

I used acrylic paint for this. I used different shade to bring out the details on her cloth and I think it came out well. 

I didn't paint the skin. I used the bare plastic and used pastel to give it a simple shading. It really gave depth to the simple one color and it brought out this kit a lot. I did this because this kit has problem with scraping. All the moving parts scrape each other and it will scrape the paint even if you used good varnish. Due to this, I didn't paint the skin. 

Also here is how it looks like with its short skirt. I think Bandai should have made it this way from the beginning. 

Large breast, just right size hip. I love how this kit looks. Painting really brought out the small details. That being said, I don't recommend painting this kit. It scrapes easily as you can see in the later pictures. simple pastel shading should do with this kit considering how detailed it is.

Aside from painting, Bandai should fix its hip/thigh part. It looks good when static, but when posing, it looks really awkward and out of place. It also limits its leg movement, and it's unable to do some of the girly poses, like legs closed together poses. Still, for the money, it's a good kit. 

Now if Bandai did a great job on this, how in the world did they screw up May! The new Fumina kit looks bad too. 

Here is the video of the build