Fiat 500 with "C" conversion

My sister drives a Fiat 500C and I built this for her as a birthday present. I used Fujimi's kit as a basis and made modifications to it to represent the "C" part of the car.

It's a great kit, there's not a whole lot of parts but the car is represented quite faithfully. The body captures the shape of the car really nicely and the interior matches that of the real car almost perfectly. The parts that are not up to par are the front seat headrests, which I modified, and the back seat headrest which are really terrible. They are just two flat discs protruding from the seats, Fujimi definitely took the easy way out there. They could have made some extra parts for the headrests without too much trouble in my opinion. On the other hand, it gave me a chance to build new ones which I rather enjoyed.

The front seats themselves are accurate, however not for my sister's car. They are still not 100%, but better once I filled a pattern that was in the seatback and added piping to them.

I also added seat belts and retainers, for both front and back seats. However, obviously the most work went into creating a "C" worthy roof. I had already decided early on that I wouldn't go as far as opening up the roof, but I did want to represent the soft top as accurately as I could. To do that I cut out a large section of the roof and then used card to create a new section with a slightly different shape and of course the smaller rear window which is typical for the 500C. I then overlayed the roof with a thin layer of Milliput, after first adding some thin strips to represent the roof's supports which are visible through the soft top (well, not exactly visible but you can tell they are there). Finally, I scratched the break light holder which is on top of the roof.

The paint I used is Zero Paints Bianco Gioioso, which is the actual colour of my sister's car. This is a two part pearl effect paint and it went on smooth as silk. It was my first go at Zero paints and I dare say not the last. I also used their 1K clearcoat lacquer which is excellent as well. I polished with Novus nr. 2 which is brilliant stuff. For the chassis, roof, window surrounds, window rubbers and the interior I used Vallejo paints, applied with a brush. Molotow Chrome and a bit of Vallejo Metal Colour for the trim on the body and also on the chassis. The dashboard is part body colour by the way, as is the steering wheel.