Building Honnouji Academy

Those of you who have been following me for a while probably know by now that I’m a huge Kill la Kill fan. Needless to say I was pretty excited once the Fight Club Mako nendoroid came out, and once I got my hands on her, I knew I wanted to do something special.

So I made Honnouji Academy.
This post is mostly behind the scenes pics of how I made my Honnouji Academy set. I didn’t realized exactly how involved this build would be, but I’m pretty happy with the result!

Let’s get started!

Here’s a picture of the final result for reference, Satsuki-Sama included for Scale.

But let’s take a few steps back… obviously I couldn’t just sit down and build this in one shot. My main method for making the set was to try some rapid prototyping to get the shapes right. I use scrap pieces of cardstock to create basic shapes, then cut & tape them until I get the shapes right. While the art student in me wanted to start with sketching, with 3D objects I like to just get my hands dirty and just keep working with it until I get it right.

Things are starting to look better, the hardest part to get right was the center piece because of the curves, which took a ton of trial and error to get things looking decent. Now that everything looks decent, I use my scraps as templates to move on to the final model.

Now that the templates have been made, it’s time to get building! The side pieces are made by taking two sheets of foamcore with some pieces in the middle. This gives it the proper width.

Once the foamcore is glued together, I take strips of bristol paper to coat the outer edge to get a nice smooth finish. I use bristol paper since it’s very thick, which is good for structure but also good since I’m going to use paint all the pieces later on down the road.

Side pieces have been glued together, time to work on the central part of Honnouji Academy.

Creating the center portion was a bit of a challenge, especially with the curved pieces. I used the ‘nose’ to hold the curvy pieces up by creating slots to hold the bristol paper at the right angle.

No-one is allowed in Fort Satsuki.

Now that the pieces are all cut, time to add some color! I used Gouache in order to paint the pieces.

When painting, it can save you a lot of time if you tape off the parts you don’t want to paint on. This saved me a ton of time when painting the windows, I just took the four pieces and ran tape across all of them to get nice even, clean lines.
Lots of painting to be done.

After getting the main part done, time to work on Satsuki’s Tower! The top of the tower was made using Foamcore, with a strip of foamcore run along the back for structural support.

Strips of bristol allow me to create the slight curve the tower has at the base.

More painting to do. I’m not the best painter in the world, but luckily the Kill la Kill background art has a bit of a painterly appearance to it, which makes thing a bit easier.

Detail of the tower, looking almost finished! The antennas are just bristol paper.

Almost done! Now all that needs to be added are the side walls.

Once again, I use scrap paper to do a sort of ‘trial and error’ to get the curves just right. Once that’s done, I can use the paper as a template and move on to the bristol paper.

Obviously the curved wall needs some form of support, which is provided by some foam core walls.

Adding some paint to the wall, we’re almost there!!

After some cleanup work, the set is finally complete!
It was a bit of a challenge to determine the scale of the project, I didn’t want to totally make it to nendoroid scale because obviously that would be pretty huge. I think I got a decent scale for nendoroid use, but it still takes up my entire drafting table ^^; Guess I can’t work on any other projects for a while lol.

Hope you enjoyed looking at my build for Honnouji Academy! Look forward to more pics of the Kill la Kill crew and all their shenanigans in the coming weeks 🙂