Rogue One: A Star Wars Story's Cassian Andor

 Since I couldn't leave just Jyn to get those Death Star plans by herself, I went ahead an picked up the matching Cassian Andor from the same figure line. This Cassian is in his initial Jedha/Eadu appearance with blue parka and puffy pants. 

INITIAL FIGURE

Right away his face deco is an improvement from the Jyn figure, as this head looks much closer to Diego Luna in appearance. Still, it's basically the "cartoon" version of his face, and leaves a lot to be desired.

DISASSEMBLY AND PRIMING

I acetone-d off his face deco but kept the hair. Since I wasn't expecting to do minute detailing for the hair I didn't mind having a slighty thicker layer there. The more paint for the primer to hold on to the better.

I unintentionally de-glued the much softer fur collar around his neck while I was trying to pop the head off with hot air. This turned out to be a good thing it would've made it much trickier and laborious to try and not paint the neck fur while detailing the blue jacket.

Since Cassian's head isn't terribly large, I went ahead and did a single coat of white primer over the whole thing, leaving just a tinge of the original coloring underneath. This step turned out to be extremely important as I will explain when I get to matte finishing this thing. I also primed his Blaster in an effort to not repeat the same mistakes from Jyn's Blaster (ironically running into a whole new problem, also related to the matte finishing.)

BASE COLORS AND DETAILS

Fortunately, this figure wasn't missing too much from his original design. I added silver to his belt buckle, pocket grenades(?) and wrist communicator. I'm glad they only showed part of his sleeve buttons as in his outfit it's a whole mess of colors. I already added some brown shoe polish staining to his pants and boots at this stage.

SHADOWING AND HIGHLIGHTS

 I added the shadowing effect here with Cosplay Chris' patented shoe polish technique. A good coating of Kiwi Scuff Cover then rubbed away with cheap napkins. You can already see how much detail came into view after this application. I especially love how the gloves came out; very gritty and seen some better days.

The shoe polish trick did however leave the parka far darker than it ever appeared on screen, so to 'return' the color, I used Americana brand True Blue and did a pass of 'semi-dry' brushing, focusing on the raised and broad areas of the parka. It did a good job of bringing life back into the hue.

DIRT AND WEAR

Same with Jyn, I dry-brushed a yellow-brown all over this thing, with focus on boots and elbows. Definitely looked like this guy's been walking across a desert.

FUR AND HAIR

For Cassian's hair I did a pass of a darker brown and painted in the grooves. The fur collar was a bit trickier as in the movie, it's very much wolf/husky fur in appearance: going from a lighter color internally to a darker color as it goes out. A layer of brown shoe polish then that same darker brown on the hair was dry brushed onto the fur tips. Not perfectly looking, but the detail in the fur looks so much more obvious now.

Also, at this stage I added the 'blush' wash to Cassian's face, except a good hint darker than Jyn's. I particularly love what this wash did for the ears as they look eerily real after this step.

FACE DETAIL

Here I laid down the flesh pink on the eyes and lips, then threw on the gloss white eyeballs.

 Using that same darker brown from before, I did light strokes for the eyebrows and beard, with dry brushing on the stubble. I probably came down a little too heavy on the eyebrows, but the shape was dead on. For his irises I used FolkArt Metallic Inca Gold. I kept the 'slightly to the left' gaze the original deco had as Diego Luna looks in that direction in all of his promo shots.

 For his hair shine I used FolkArt Metallic Bronze and dry brushed quite liberally.

FINISHING TOUCHES

I didn't get it on photo, but I did add the same lip gap wash, except this time adding a light coat afterwards; you can see his lips are a little too 'hot pink' before this step.

 This is after a basic coat of Krylon Matte finisher. Now here's where I ran into some issues, old and new:

• His fur collar is a very soft rubbery +plastic, highly plasticized PVC I believe. It did not hold onto this finisher AT ALL. But because the finisher is Acetone based, it pretty much melted any 'raw' paint it touched. So as you'll see it's still in this extremely glossy state that, unfortunately, took a small chunk of hair paint with it right after I took these pictures.
•  As mentioned earlier, a similar quirk ate the paint on his Blaster's grip. His fists are also PVC; they didn't get too glossy, but definitely kept the finisher 'free', completely melting the acrylic off that grip and revealing the white primer underneath.

So new rule from now on: ALL PVC parts need to be primed. No exception. His head is also PVC but did not suffer the same overgloss/leaching effect, so I'm gonna stick with this rule from here on out.

COMPLETED FIGURE

So here is Cassian Andor in his mostly-painted glory. I think it looks pretty darn good. Very happy with how the face came out, and I'm also happy that I did the highlight work on the parka, as that would've looked REALLY drab without it. I didn't bother gluing back on the parka fur collar since I didn't want them to do anymore damage to the hair (thankfully really hard to see from these pictures). I might not ever actually glue it back, as it takes no work to make it snug for display/picture purposes.

 Here are Cassian and Jyn side by side, cautiously tracking Saw Gerrera's henchmen. And yes, Jyn is holding that Blaster all wrong; I didn't want to damage the black paint on it anymore than I already have so I kept the grip loose. Although I think I will just go ahead and use my enamel paint markers on both of their Blasters.

BEFORE AND AFTER

And lastly, here are the before and after shots of this figure. Again, they put in a considerable amount of work into this mold but gets sidelined as 'kids toys' because of lack of paint. I didn't even know he had those sleeve buttons until I had to look them up from screengrabs.

Can't say enough how happy I am with the turnout of the face; from far away enough it just looks dead on Diego Luna. Obviously there's no way I can expect Hot Toys level of detail but for such an inexpensive figure there was a lot of realism that was just simply hidden by lame tampography.

I have more Star Wars coming down the pipe, as well as some tasty Justice League figures just begging to be repainted. Until next time!

-A.K.