My First Painted 3D Print: Asuna from Sword Art Online
Everyone has to start somewhere. For me, it was Asuna.
This Asuna model from Sword Art Online, sculpted by Kaidan3D, was the first 3D printed model I ever fully painted. At the time, I had very little idea what I was doing. I was learning how to use an airbrush, how to properly thin paints, how to control a brush, and eventually even how to think about things like shadows and highlights.
At one point during the process, I became frustrated enough that I genuinely considered giving up on painting entirely.
Thankfully, I didn't.
Asuna is far from perfect. Looking at her now, there are wobbly lines, flat colors, inconsistent transitions, and plenty of things I would approach differently with what I've learned since. But that's exactly why I wanted her to be the first model I wrote about.
I don't want these posts to only showcase my best work. I want them to document my progression as a painter—what I tried, what went wrong, what I learned, and hopefully how I've improved from one model to the next.
And that story starts here.
Starting With the Base
The very first thing I ever painted was probably the least intimidating part of the entire model: the base.
It's a relatively simple stone structure, and compared with everything waiting for me on Asuna herself, there wasn't much opportunity to completely ruin it. I could experiment a little, see how the paint behaved, and get something finished before moving on to the character.
And I was actually pretty happy with it.
It wasn't anything particularly complicated, but seeing a bare printed part turn into something that looked like stone gave me my first little bit of confidence. For someone who had never painted a model before, simply finishing that first piece and liking how it looked felt like a win.
Unfortunately, that confidence was going to be tested pretty quickly.
My First Attempt at "Shading"
Next came the teal energy effects surrounding the model.
I knew that I didn't want them to be one completely uniform color. I wanted them darker toward the bottom and brighter toward the tips.
There was just one small problem:
I had absolutely no idea how to do that.
At this point, I didn't really understand highlighting or shading. I wasn't thinking about mixing darker and lighter versions of a color or how light would actually interact with the object.
Instead, I came up with the simplest solution I could think of.
I took the same teal paint and changed how much of it I sprayed.
Where I wanted the effect to appear darker, I sprayed a heavier coat. Where I wanted it brighter, I sprayed less and allowed more of the underlying color to show through. There wasn't a darker teal for the shadows or a lighter teal for the highlights. It was all the exact same paint.
Looking back, it's obviously not how I would approach the effect today. But at the time, I was trying to create something I didn't yet have the knowledge or technique to create, and I found a way to at least approximate the effect I wanted.
That ended up being a recurring theme throughout this project.
Moving On to Asuna
With the base and effects finished, it was finally time to start painting Asuna herself.
I began with her uniform. Using the airbrush, I covered all of the white areas with a slightly off-white color rather than a stark pure white.
So far, so good.
Then I picked up a brush and started painting the red trim.
This is where everything fell apart.
The red detailing on Asuna's uniform requires a lot of reasonably precise lines, and I quickly discovered two things I was terrible at: brush control and properly thinning paint.
Those two problems fed directly into each other.
My brush wasn't always going exactly where I wanted it to go, while paint that wasn't properly thinned didn't flow from the brush the way I expected. Trying to correct a bad line could easily create another problem. Against the off-white uniform, every little wobble in that bright red trim seemed incredibly obvious.
It was frustrating.
Actually, "frustrating" probably undersells it.
The Point Where I Wanted to Quit
This was the point where I seriously started questioning whether painting was something I wanted to continue doing.
I had started this because painting 3D printed models looked fun. Instead, I was sitting there fighting with tiny red lines, unable to make my hands or my paint behave the way I wanted them to.
And when you're working on your first model, you don't yet have any evidence that you're going to get better.
You don't have an older model sitting on a shelf that you can compare against. You don't have dozens of previous mistakes that taught you how to fix the current one. You don't even necessarily know why something isn't working.
You just know that what you're producing doesn't look like what you imagined in your head.
Even several models later, at the time I'm writing this, brush control and paint thinning are still things I have a long way to go on. They're skills that develop through practice. But while painting Asuna, I didn't have that perspective yet.
For a while, I genuinely wanted to give up entirely.
Thankfully, I didn't.
I started finding communities of other painters who were willing to answer questions, offer advice, and reassure me that struggling with these things was normal when you're learning.
So I kept going.
Eventually, I managed to finish the red and silver trim.
The lines were still wobbly. They weren't suddenly professional-quality because somebody gave me a few tips. But they were done.
And when I looked at the uniform as a whole instead of staring from a few inches away at every imperfect line, I was happy with it.
That was enough to keep going.
Bringing Asuna to Life: Skin, Hair, and the Final Details
With the uniform behind me, I could move on to the parts that would really start making the model look like Asuna: her skin, hair, face, sword, and all of the smaller details that would bring everything together.
The skin was probably the simplest of these. At this point, my sophisticated understanding of painting skin was approximately:
Find skin-colored paint. Apply skin-colored paint. Done.
Just like with the teal energy effects, I still didn't really understand shading. I wasn't thinking about highlights, shadows, warmth, or subtle variations in skin tone. I basically applied a single skin color everywhere and called it a day.
Her hair turned out to be surprisingly difficult, but for a completely different reason.
Asuna has a lot of hair, and I had absolutely no idea how much paint I needed to mix for it.
I mixed up a color I liked, loaded it into the airbrush, started painting...
...and ran out.
So I tried to recreate the mixture.
It wasn't quite the same.
Then I managed to do essentially the same thing again.
I ended up mixing the hair color two or three separate times, and I could never perfectly reproduce the previous mixture. That made getting a consistent color across all of those separate pieces much harder than it needed to be.
It's one of those lessons that seems incredibly obvious now: if you're creating a custom color for a large part of a model, make more than you think you're going to need.
The sword gave me another one of those early lessons that seems obvious in hindsight. I found a teal color that looked remarkably close to what I wanted and figured it would be perfect.
There was only one detail I failed to notice before I started:
It was airbrush paint.
And I was trying to brush it on by hand.
Because the paint was already thinned considerably for use through an airbrush, getting good coverage with a regular brush was much more difficult than I expected. Once again, I had accidentally made a relatively simple part of the project considerably harder for myself.
Then there were the eyes.
After everything else that had given me trouble, these were intimidating. Anime eyes are such a major part of a character's appearance that I knew getting them noticeably wrong could make the entire face look off.
Somehow, though, they ended up being one of the parts I was happiest with.
I even managed to introduce the tiniest amount of shading rather than simply filling them with a completely flat color, which felt like a pretty significant accomplishment at the time.
They're definitely not perfect. Looking closely, I think they may be positioned slightly off-center, or perhaps one is just a little larger than the other. But for my first-ever attempt at painting eyes, I was genuinely happy with them.
Once the face was finished, the sword was ready, and all of those enormous sections of hair were finally attached, I started to see something other than a collection of individually painted resin pieces.
She was actually starting to look like Asuna.
And after how close I'd come to giving up earlier in the project, seeing her face and hair finally come together made reaching the finish line feel very real.
Where It All Started
Looking back at Asuna now is a little strange because I can immediately see things I would do differently.
I'd approach the teal effects completely differently. I'd add actual shadows and highlights to the skin. I'd make enough hair paint the first time. I'd handle the sword differently. And hopefully I'd make those red lines a little straighter.
But that's also exactly what I want from this model.
Asuna captures where I was when I started painting. I didn't understand shading. I struggled to thin paints properly. My brush control frustrated me to the point of wanting to quit. I made basic mistakes simply because I didn't have the experience yet to know that they were mistakes.
And I finished her anyway.
That's what matters to me most about this model.
Finishing Asuna didn't suddenly make me good at painting. It didn't solve the things I was struggling with, and even several models later, I'm still working on some of those exact same skills.
What it did was convince me to paint one more model.
And then another.
Every model since has given me another opportunity to learn something, make different mistakes, try new techniques, and hopefully get a little better.
One day, though, I do want to come back to Asuna.
Rather than repainting this model, I want to print her again from scratch and see what I can do with everything I've learned since that first attempt. I want to put the two versions next to each other—the first model I ever painted and a new version painted with all of the experience I've gained since—and be able to physically see that progression.
And there's another reason I want to return to her.
Asuna is one of my all-time favorite characters. She's a big part of why I chose this model as my first painting project in the first place, and eventually I'd like to give this sculpt the paint job I know I wasn't capable of giving it the first time around.
Until then, though, this Asuna isn't going anywhere.
The wobbly lines, flat skin tones, mismatched hair colors, and all the other little imperfections are part of her. They're a record of where I started.
Someday, hopefully I'll be able to put a much better Asuna next to her and see just how far I've come.
But there wouldn't be a second Asuna without the first.
And I'm very glad I decided to finish her.
Up Next: Kaisel from Solo Leveling
Asuna was only the beginning.
Check out the second model I painted: Kaisel from Solo Leveling, also sculpted by Kaidan3D →