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!

Done but not.

Got bored and built Masurao, though it won’t be staying with these colors as soon as I can do something about it.

He’s looking a bit cold though…

Today, I am a being that surpasses even Asura!

It’s a neat kit but it’s not without it’s quirks, which I’ll discuss and/or try to fix by the next post.

Also, Lucas’ Strike-E GET. More on that as it develops.

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.

MG Exia WiP- Frame complete

While the leg is obviously not there in this picture, I did finish it later…just didn’t take a picture. So far so good, just waiting on the paint now so I can give the frame it’s coat and then move on to the outer armor parts.

With new batteries, the LED is honkin’ bright.

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.

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.

…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.

WIP – Black Tri-Stars Zaku II

Planning on taking my time on this one since I think I’ll be getting some topcoat and giving it a go (currently looking at this kind, but what’s the difference because that and this? And what about this other stuff?) Please give me some feedback on topcoats that haven’t ruined your models. I was going to paint it to hide the clipmarks and swirl but couldn’t find any particluar sets that were exactly the right colors.

Various Updates

Updated the ‘Finished Projects’ page with links to photobucket albums of the models listed there. The finished models themselves will likely be on the last pages of the albums since I opted to upload the construction pictures as well.

Picking up the HD Hyaku-Shiki from the post office tomorrow (Apparently they just left the slip instead of even trying to knock on the door to drop it off. I can only figure this is because they didn’t want to leave a package with 100$ worth of items just sitting out) along with my three action bases. Expect more pictures to materialize in the aforementioned albums and an update here mentioning it sooner or later.

If I’m timing everything right (Gundam Store and More typically has my items to me in two days) then by the end of the week I’ll have the Zaku II and Zeta, assuming I miss the UPS fellow due to being at work with the God Gundam not far behind (the seller, the same one I bought my Hi-Nu from, is also pretty speedy) those two. Looks like I’ll be plenty busy until PG Red Frame ships out! I almost bought the 00/0-Raiser combination from HLJ in addition to all of this, but after looking at the model I decided I really really really am not fond of the way it looks. Not to mention I’m sure Bandai will release a version that comes with the GN Blade III sometime in the future, or possibly a Trans-AM EXF version that includes said sword. I’m still holding out for a Masurao or preferably a Susanoo 1/100 model, but so far it’s been nothing but fairly uninteresting suits for the season two models. I will say that I’d love to see a master grade release of the Exia or 00 (if they made it look less bland) since the current no grade 00 kits are able to do some excellent posing. Alas, who knows when or even if that will happen.

In other news, I am sick to death of this cold weather. I’m looking forward to spring and being able to open a window and enjoy a cool breeze!