I am finally finishing up the Piececool Q-Series models of the Three Kingdoms characters. And I’m guessing that it will also just be finishing up the Q-Series in general, because it doesn’t seem like that line is destined to receive any additions in the future. But boy-howdy did I save the best for last. I did them in numerical order, and while Killen (Lv Bu) was pretty cool, Banas (Diao Chan) is gorgeous.

Of course, I may be biased because of how it lends so well to fine-tuned shaping / customization. Adding a bit of curve and curl to the peacock ornamentation headdress is just such a nice way to finish this line. In addition, I had a bit of fun adding tweaks and curves to Killen as well, in particular, I had fun with the head of his staff/spear, curving the edges outwards. And his headware got some love, too… though the feathers still drive me nuts because I can’t get them to match.

It seems that I should have been spreading these models out a bunch more, rather than clumping them together in groups. Because I enjoyed building these two much more after having taken a long break from building them. Granted, I made a few mistakes that I would not have made had I been building them all together (guess I forgot some lessons along the way), but still. It’s more about enjoying the process than finishing without making mistakes, right?

Much like the rest of these models, these are both easy and not easy. I made them more challenging than they needed to be by hiding as many tabs as possible, some of which made it quite challenging. Oh, and on Killen, I managed to completely forget to attach the torso ornament until after I had already attached the torso to the pants, so I had to add that part on afterwards – not fun. But the part that I had the most fun with was adding my own personal touches to everything. It adds to the build time and challenge, but I really enjoy it. Curves on ribbons, tassels, horns, peacocks, twisting danglies so they aren’t all at the same orientation. Just fun stuff like that.

As for specifics, I will point out, again, that you can alter the build order on the pants / skirt connection so the tabs on the skirt can be folded on the inside, instead of the outside. In this case, it’s on the Killen build, and all you have to do is leave the “flaps” of the pants section pointing up, form the skirt completely (closing up the tabs) and slide the pants through from the bottom. Then you can fold the flaps down and seat the tabs in their slots at the same time.

One thing that surprised me, when builing Killen, is that the directions have you hold off on attaching the pauldrons (shoulder ornamentation) until the very end. I think this is because they stick up a lot more than others, and they almost collide with his earring on one side. I had to bend the earing back a bit to get that pauldrons on in my build.

As for Banas, the build was fairly straight forward. Very involved, and lots of delicate parts that I tended to glue in place, just in case, but mostly straight forward. And to top it off, the diagram for the way to curve the ribbons was so much easier to understand this time around. Of course, it helps that I already know how it’s supposed to be built, but I don’t know. This made more sense this time around.

And for one (or technically two) more details before we finish, I decided it would be a waste if I didn’t take a family picture of all these models together. Unfortunately, there are so many of them, I couldn’t get them all in focus at the same time. So here are two photos where most of them are in focus in at least one of the photos.

And that is it for the Piececool Q-Series / Three Kingdoms models! Each of these last two took me about 2 hours, give or take, to build. You can find the build videos below, silent as ever.