Two things.

Firstly, 00′s page is done! I love the color black.

Secondly, I have a bit of sad news. I’m going to be moving next week…which means that I’m not going to be able to build any gunpla for awhile since I can’t buy kits, paint or any of the extra stuff that now comes along with the art of building these wonderful things. I know I have a few more pages to type up, but I’ve already started to prepare for the move and have packed up the majority of my stuff, including my kits and tools and moved them in to the new place so I can’t even take pictures right now. This is by no means the end of IAG!, since I still have pages and whatnot to do…but there will not be much by way of new content until I make sure everything is stable after the move since as you gents well know, real life takes priority.

Stay classy until then, ladies and gentlemen!

Add another one to the list!

One of my two christmas gunpla got here today and thanks to being up for about 42 hours, I polished this one off in under 24 hours. The best part is all the paint used was leftover! Proper pictures are taken and whatnot, but I’d like to get my other models caught up first..besides, this leaves a little mystery as to the exact details of the kit.

New PG 00 Raiser Images

Taken from this awesome gallery, where more pictures are available. Looks like while the GN Drive things themselves don’t rotate, the Raiser wings can, in fact, move. I’m very happy to see this and have to see the finished kit is looking better now, enough that I might considering picking it up some time down the road.

Gundam Expo stuff

Care of Rob over at American Salaryman, who is updating from his phone like a champ. Thanks a ton!

• PG 00 Raiser in November
• Gundam Unicorn OVA, 6 50 minute episodes
• Unicorn and Destory mode Unicorn HGUCs
• MG Astray Blue Frame

While the PG 00 news and Unicorn OVA have me pretty excited, not much else so far. I wonder if Bandai will have a preorder bonus again for the 00 Raiser like they did with the PG Red Frame…? I’d prefer if there was an option for the Seven Sword system myself, but who knows. The HGUC Unicorns should be interesting as well, I might pick those up to compare them with the MG counterpart.

In other news, got Sazabi’s pictures taken and the review written up, just need to put the two together so I can be one step closer to being caught up.

We interrupt this blog to BLOW YOUR MIND.

Holy. Crap. I thought that by the time I got around to building PG Strike, that would be it for me and the PG line. I’m curious to see what they do with the PG 00 and really hope it looks flat-out amazing, compared to the not-so-sweet 1/100. I do have a few ideas for modding it and painting, so either way I think we can find something to work with.

News and picture care of Ngee Khoing.

Group photo now!

Due to the marked lack of action around here, Here’s a picture of the ever reliable gunpla shelf (click for high resolution). I think the majority them have a post about them and if they don’t it’s something I’m working on fixing. You can also see that Nu is close to being finished! Then it’s just a matter of time until Sword Impulse. Will probably make a WIP post for Nu tomorrow to show most of the construction.

…Double Oh!

While the 0 Raiser is still on the way, the 00 itself is finished. Overall I’m pleased with what I got out of this kit though I think in terms of engineering I prefer the detail and look of the Exia. The 00 is just very…plain. While the S1 kits weren’t as detailed as something like the Gundam OYW they did have a little bit of panel lining to spice things up. As you’ll see there isn’t much of that going on here with the 00.

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Side by side with the Exia. Normally these two kits would be the same color-wise but after painting the 00 it wound up darker. Gotta say though, I’m kind of partial to how it turned out, though the parts I painted at first like the chest and shoulders are a bit sloppy when compared to the GN drives and the plates over the drive daggers. I used Tamiya flat blue/flat red for the body and feet, gold leaf for the v-fin and gunmetal for the joints. As you can see the Exia is an older kit I did, parts of it looking kind of sloppy now. If there’s one disappointment to be found with the 00′s design it’s the very anorexic legs and the lack of a chest orb. I found the orb to give all of the S1 suits a little bit of extra flavor that set them apart from other suits that we’ve seen recently and the S2 suits seem to be back to business as usual.

If there’s one thing that I did that turned out better on the Exia, it’s definitely the GN condensers. The gunmetal color I used (Model Master) definitely lent itself better to enhancing the shine of the metallic green gundam marker than the Tamiya brand did. Either that or it’s time to replace the metallic green as it’s not doing the ‘metallic’ part of it’s job any more. In this picture you can really see how tiny the 00′s legs are compared to Exia’s. They also lack the joint near the middle of the foot, something that I can’t figure out why they would get rid of.

GN Sword II. Simple weapons (Didn’t bother with rifle mode pictures, sorry) but they don’t look all that bad. This is about as dynamic as poses get with the 00 since the torso doesn’t turn much and the legs are somewhat restricted by the side skirt armor. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing though since it prevents the splits problem the Exia and Astraea kits had and as you can see it can still get in to some good positions.

00 also packs two beam sabers. Oddly the beams are now your standard UC kit beams instead of the small flat beams the original 00 kits were. They don’t really go in to the slots for the beams all that easily, so they’ll probably be staying on the back..

The twin drive system! The blades under the drives can pop off and be used as forearm mounted daggers or put together for a bladed shield. Personally I think they look better on the back but we’ll see if I can still use them once the 0 Raiser gets here.

Speaking of the twin drives, they have a good range of motion and are able to move up and down on the mounts as well as around so they’ll rarely if ever get in the way of posing.

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All in all I’m okay with the kit itself, minor gripes aside. Were more parts available to me I’d be inclined to try to kitbash something together for some better waist movement and to spice up the legs a bit..but that’s something for farther down the line. As I mentioned in a comment on Rob’s blog, the lack of the GN Sword 3 and all of the different variations of this kit (I think there’s 3 or 4 now?) kind of bother me…but if we get an MG of the 00 or Exia I’ll probably pick either (or both!) up. I could count this little project as finished but since the 0 Raiser is still on the way this gets marked up as a WIP post.

Up next after the 00-Raiser is the RX-78-2 Gundam Ver. OYW, which I’ll be recoloring (by hand..again. Maybe I should buy an airbrush?) as my final practice run before I lay in to my big project. I thought about just leaving it be then realized I accidentally got the Game Color Ver., which has a more pastel color scheme than the animation version and I do not like it at all…so it’s off to the races.

A little practice~!

While this isn’t my big project, these next two models are ones that I’m hoping to gain some experience on that will prove useful for the final task.

That my friends, is the 1/100 00 Gundam model…with all of the parts (save the white) being hand painted. So far so good aside from a few spots that got a little mussed up (tried to use clear green paint instead of my metallic green gundam marker- should have stuck with the marker and I managed to lose the eye stickers…not that it matters since you can barely see the eyes anyway). While it has far less parts than your average MG it’s still not a bad kit. Mind you, I’m only this far in to it…but I’m hoping the painting process works out for the best. I’ll probably attempt to apply some shadowing to the white parts before using a semi-gloss topcoat over the whole thing.