To say that the Elyn Kashatryia (Kshatriya) is a rather different kit is an understatement. The kit comes with all pieces separated in trays, and the legs and arms pre-assembled.But pre-assembled legs is not good for painting, with the hydraulic piston parts being the major issue. Above you can see I’ve take the legs apart and separated them from the waist. I’ve removed the pistons, carefully noting how to get it back together.Here’s the hydraulic pieces ready to be painted. As usual for small pieces I stick them to a piece of masking tape. For these yellow pieces I’m aiming for a slightly orange hue, so I started with Tamiya yellow and finished with Tamiya clear yellow which has a slightly orange tint to it.While I was waiting on the hydraulic pieces to dry, I primed, then used Createx black on the leg sections, dry brushed them with Tamiya Weathering Master titanium, and then added a quick top coat of Future Finish to protect the dry brushing. I hand painted some Tamiya clear orange as details on the hydraulic pieces, then re-assembled them back into legs. On the legs I added some small details in Tamiya clear red and orange.  The chest section was a touch tricky as I forgot to disassemble part of it. The frame sections are all black then dry brushed, with details in clear red and orange just like the legs. The first of the chromed detail parts are added with a dab of glue to help them stay in place. The first piece of wiring has a small circuit board that is inserted into small connectors in the side sections. It was tight, and a bit tricky to get in place, especially so as to ensure the short wires leading to the head had enough length. The connector for the head section needed a small bit of work to allow the wires to exit nicely. Now for the first of the armour pieces. Only a small amount of clean up work was needed on these pre-trimmed parts. Most parts do need nub removal, but they’re mostly under-gated or generally not too problematic to cleanly finish. For the dark green sections of armour I’m using the same mix of Createx paint that I used on Geara Doga. The blue sections are Createx pear blue, and the grey section is Alclad grey primer.  The binders are of course the largest and most spectacular part of this mech. The binders needed a small amount of work to prepare them, which could have almost have been ignored for most parts, but these being so prominently on display on the finished model it was worth sanding, priming and sanding again until the very slight mould lines were removed. I was pleasantly surprised at the location of the mould lines in that on part of them ran along a line in the model and thus didn’t need to be removed as they appear as detail. The area that did need to be removed was on the top rounded section where it was easy to remove.

Before painting their green colour, I used Createx black around the edges in a number of passes to build up where the shadow shades would go. To help highlight the rounded section at the top, I then added a pass of Createx white. With the grey, black and white under-paint, the green that will go on top will adapt to the underlying shading.For the lighter green I again used the same colour combination that had worked so well on Geara Doga. I thinned the green down with Tamiya thinner to allow me to build up the green shading. Above is just after the first pass.Now with the second pass the green colouring is working great. I may add more green, but we’ll see after this pass has dried and panel lines added.