Kitbash is continuing.

I still need to mask and paint the blues on the skirt armor, legs, head and forearms along with the chromed orange for the GN drive strips/chest orb/mask, but this is rapidly approaching completion. Not pictured: MG ReZEL backpack parts have their white base coat, ran out of what I had mixed up and didn’t feel like doing more after painting all the parts I did earlier!

Let’s try making semi-frequent updates.

Don’t know how long this will last, but since a huge snowstorm is coming (it would seem that someone heard Z and I hating on winter) I might wind up with some time to actually work on my kits.

Still a decent amount of work left on ReZEL, the entire backpack and rifle but at least the blue is coming out nicely on it. I have to touch the crotch hook up (I’m not as bold as GaiGun to remove the whole thing) so the line doesn’t take a weird bend but so far so good.

The Astraea is finally starting to look like more than a random hodgepodge of suits though both of these projects will be stalling out as far as applying finer detail goes since I managed to run out of masking tape. Mental note: keep more of that stuff around in the future.

Dear winter,

You suck.

Still out of sorts, so I haven’t been doing much lately. V-Dash has a few pictures taken, but to be honest the kit itself is one of those that is great to work on but when it comes to posing and photos there’s only so much you can do especially if you don’t want to damage the paint or anything. I’ll try to have the page done soonish, sill.

ReZEL is coming along now, it’s time to start masking areas off to paint the blue accents and work on the backpack and weapons.

The Astraea kitbash has become a monster of it’s own. I think I’ve finally hit the point where it’s time to start puttying all the parts together and painting things. For the curious, the total sword count is 19 blades. In other gunpla news, I wound up with the RG Zaku II and MG Red Frame after going to Ohayocon this weekend…so much for not buying more kits. This must be how busterbeam feels.

Juggling act.

Progress is getting made on everything, despite mother nature’s best attempts to hold me up as much as possible.

V-Dash is coming along great. I still have all of the other weapons to build and paint, not to mention decal everything. But I think now that I have this much together I can really focus on ReZEL and the Astraea kitbash. I’m VERY pleased with how this turned out so far.

ReZEL’s parts are all prepped for priming and painting, just need to find the free time to get that done. I even have the primer mixed and ready thanks to having some Mr. Spare bottles now (another awesome purchase care of Sonar).

This thing has been tweaked a little bit and is on my list of stuff to prime at the same time as ReZEL. So far so good!

V-Dash progress+more

This is turning out wonderfully. I’m pleased with how my first airbrush project is turning out!

I’m also done painting ReZEL’s white parts and am trying to find time to start priming the outer armor parts.

I think I’m going to tweak the GN drive placement, but this is turning out alright so far too! Should be priming it soon.

We interrupt these WIPS to BLOW YOUR MIND!

Is that what I think it is!? You bet your ass it is! While I usually don’t post news on my blog (I’ll let Ngee, Gundam Guy and others handle that) this is pretty huge to me so I felt the urge to make a post about it. I’ve been hoping for Gundam W master grades FOREVER. Say what you want to about the series but it was the first Gundam series most of us here stateside saw and because of that it’ll always be somewhat special to me. Not to mention I really loved the mecha, the majority of the designs are really good (with an exception here and there- I’m looking at you, Cancer) and never really got any proper gunpla loving. Hopefully the Wing Gundam getting an MG is followed by other W suits. Also announced was a MG Musha Mk II, which will be using the Gundam 2.0s frame supposedly, along with a SLEW of new HGs for the new ‘High Grade Across the Universal Century’ line, which I’m just going to call HGAU. Right new we’ve got the following for the line:

HG God Gundam
HG ZZ
HG Avalanche Exia
HG Astraea Type-F
HG Gundam X
HG 1 Gundam

This is shaping up to be an incredibly awesome line. The ZZ and X will definitely be on my list of things to pick up!

News care of NK/various forums.

I might as well show you a shot of the Strike, since I ran out of paint and don’t know when it’ll get finished now. You might want to brace yourselves before going any further…

Noir no more, this is the Strike LIME!

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.

An Old Friend

Everyone, meet Astraea. This is the very first gundam I built back in december or  so of 2008 and the kit that really hooked me in to this past time. It’s very obvious it was my first kit- I didn’t have the proper marker for panel lining, there are nub marks in various places and there are some seams here and there.

I was still overjoyed at how well the kit had turned out when I had finished it. It had taken me all day to just assemble the basics of the model, the weapons wound up having to wait until a few days after.

Time passed and though my skills improved, I left Astraea on display on the lower shelf of my stand as a reminder as to where I started. It got dusted off just like all the other models and occasionally posed around something else, though it was usually near the other 00 kits (Dynames, my second gunpla, and Exia- the 5th or 6th). One day while moving everything around to make some more room for the future, the elbow peg on Astraea’s right arm gave way and snapped! I was a little bummed since it was the first gundam I had put together. While I’m not nearly as proud of it as I was originally I still wanted to leave it out.

That’s when I got an idea.

The Exia Repair at the start of Gundam 00 season two was one of my  favorite mechs that we’ll never see a proper model of. I had contemplated buying another Exia kit or the 1/144 version along with a Tierren Ground Type for the sole purpose of cutting them apart and mashing them together. The broken arm on Astraea was a perfect chance to do something just like that! After a few days of work, we got the following-

Not bad for being generally clueless when it comes to battle damage! I tried to drybrush some metallic grey in to the gashes with varying degrees of success, but in the end I think I should have stuck with the weathering compund for that. I went over the entire kit with some sandpaper to take away the plastic shine and then covered it with sand/light sand, topcoated it then did the same thing over again. Maybe I’m applying it wrong but it seems like some of the weathering blows off when I apply topcoat to the model, necessitating a second go. The cloak is a brown shirt that I hacked apart (Thanks goes to Mmy for finding a tut while I was at work) and and burned to give it that worn out look, as well as applying the same sand weathering to it. The collar of the cloak has a wire instead to keep it from doing whatever it wants though right now if it’s messed with it takes a bit of time to get looking normal again.

I’m even more happy with this kit than I originally was now that it has a little more work put in to it. I originally planned to redo the panel lining as well but sanding everything down sort of cleaned things up on their own..not that you can see much of the panel lining now anyway. It now sits on the shelf with the rest of the gunpla I’ve put extra effort in to.