Hi again.

It’s been awhile. Life has been busy, you guys know how it can go sometimes. Seems like things are hitting that point for a lot of us lately (Z, Busterbeam, ASM and myself to name a few) but I’ve had some free time lately to work on more than a few things.

Let’s get down to a few other things first. Robot4Less started their affiliate program, which I joined since their prices aren’t too bad and they have a decent selection of models. There won’t really be any changes to the site, though when new kits get announced I’ll likely plug their preorder page and whatever I’m working on currently will probably be linked at the end of a blog post. Since I do make commissions for whenever someone buys something via my link, that money can go right back towards models and supplies and that’s always a good thing, yeah?

Another idea a few friends of mine and I have be rolling around: Is there any interest in a stream for Gunpla building? It’s fairly easy to set up and while gunpla might not be the most exciting thing in the world to watch it does present a good chance to do one of my favorite things- bounce ideas around and in general talk about gunpla and what people are up to in regards to their own builds. Let me know what you guys think.

NOW, for the real reason everyone is here: Robots. Wing Zero is on hold because surprise, wiring those wings is exactly as frustrating as you’d expect. Combine that with a few other weird problems I’ve run in to (like how to put the LEDs so they don’t shine through the plastic- black paint is out because it’d look horrible when anyone looked at the underside of the wing) and you’ve got me just not wanting to fuss with that kit for awhile. But I’ve been hard at work on something else.

These are primed now, this was the last picture I took of them beforehand though. These alone took a good few days to finish because I’m being so picky about the seam lines. One of the Bazookas still has a seam line on top of it, but I’ll have to either putty it or just let it go because I’ve almost hit the exhaustion point as far as sand, prime, sand, prime, sand prime goes for these things.

With the weapons mostly taken care of for the time being (because pacing is key and I don’t want to burn myself out), I started to work on various parts of the actual mobile suit. The head was easy enough to put an LED in and keep the transformation just fine which was totally expected thanks to the ample amount of room it has in it. The light  bleeding problem will be taken care of when I paint everything and if that doesn’t do it, I’ll switch to a battery with a little less juice.

The legs require a little more creative thinking, something I’m sure the rest of this little project will too. A big part of figuring out how to do this is going to be deciding what parts of the frame are superfluous and cutting them down to make sure the parts can slide around the LED without the wires or anything getting in the way. Here you can see that I carved out a small square of space for the 1.8mm LED to fit (purchased from the ever-reliable modeltrainsoftware). At first that was all I did, but the wires from the LED kept the armor from closing all the way so I had to cut away more of the frame’s part so the wires could move to the inside and not screw the armor’s movement up. The thighs will also have to use two LEDs, one for the front and one for the back, since one LED can’t shine bright enough to light the entire area up.

Again, you can see the light bleeding though the white plastic but it still looks pretty decent as is. The hardest part will be coming up next (the knee) but as I look at it I think I’ve already got a pretty good idea as to how I’m going to handle it. It’ll involve a lot of cutting of both the LED and the wires but you do what you have to do. I’d like to have everything running to one central battery but that may be a bit too much to hope for. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

‘Til next time!

Little stuff.

The priming section of the new tutorial is up!

I also finished this thing, finally. I need to sand off the overspray on the bottom area since I forgot to mask that area off properly when I sprayed the chest area.

Oh yeaaaaah!

After ENTIRELY too much time, I’m finally finished with my biggest battle to date. May I present…

The RX-0 Absolution! I started this big recolor project back in APRIL, meaning this model definitely took me the longest to finish. Considering all the work I had to do, it’s no real surprise…

Anyway, while this picture is a distant shot I wanted to showcase everything. Aside from the inner frame of the model the vast majority of this model was meticulously painted and decaled though some parts turned out better than others…overall I’m still very proud of it.

The main body, unequipped. That’s the stand from the Gundam Mk2 (which has yet to even be started), I thought it would look nice for the pictures. I really need to make myself a nice lightbox.

Closer shot of the chest. Yeah, I missed a corner. Fixed it later but I’m out of topcoat and HLJ has it on backorder. ((( You can also see I didn’t have a decal pushed down all the way, which resulted in that ugly white spot on the arm. I’m not sure what to do about that but I’m sure I’ll think of something.

Boosters! The NT-D mode has plenty of them and loves to show ‘em off. Chrome/metallic red. The brightness serves as a nice contrast.

I am now convinced I need a better way to shave down nubs than a hobby knife because I hate hate HATE looking at those ugly ass marks on the gatling guns. Anyway,  these are the primary weapons for this particular mobile suit. There’s another set on the other arm. What can I say, I was always a Heavyarms fan.

The shield clips on to the bit that connects the gatling to the arm, so there was no reason to not put it together. The topcoat betrays me again and I don’t know why. I’m sure it’s my fault, but I think the black/blue/grey come together very well on it.

Full load. I had ‘All-Out Offensive’ in mind with this project. I had originally planned on rigging up a second shoulder mounted bazooka but couldn’t find a suitable epoxy.  It doesn’t matter too much since the arms have so much weight on the already adding more would be a bad idea…it can barely hold the arms up!

Pew pew pew beam magnum. The body is done with flat black, with gunmetal for the ammo pack and chrome for the barrel and rail that slides to drop out the ammo.

Bazooka! Not something you want to be on the recieving end of. You can’t see it, but I painted the missiles flat red and the ammo pack in gunmetal, just like the beam magnum’s.

“Absolution…launch!”

So, there you have it. My biggest gunpla project to date (and probably ever- I’m not sure if there’s another suit out there that I want to put this much effort in to again), and it’s one I wanted to do since my original Unicorn Gundam. It feels nice to finally do it and get mostly good results out of it! The deals look much better than the stickers and where a lot less of a pain to put on but they did require additional patience since I had to keep getting warm water over and over. Every little bit of extra works just makes the model that much better though, and I’ve always been a believer in that you get out of it what you put in to it. I came away with some good experience from this model and while I’m not sure if I’ll be going this in depth any more I’m sure that painting my kits to cover clip marks (something I never was originally concerned with) is now going to be commonplace.

I’ll probably make an update before I start working on the Gundam Mk2 since I’m trying to avoid getting burnt out but we’ll see what the topic will be! ‘Till next time!

RX-78-2 Ver. OYW and…

Taking my sweet time with this one (already on day four of building it), but so far it’s been a pretty pleasant experience. No complicated gimmicks, just the normal Gundam we know and love. The version I got was some PS2 game color version that was mostly muted pastels, which wound up not mattering much since I was planning on painting the kit from the start. Went with a combination of metallic grey/gunmetal/gold leaf/flat black with some chrome for some accent on the boosters. Sadly, the gunmetal I used on the backpack didn’t wind up looking much different from the metallic grey of the chest.

This is where I stopped on day two, day one being the head and chest. I hear a lot of complaints about the legs on the 1.5/OYW versions of the RX-78 but I didn’t think it was that horrible to cut out..only as bad as chopping out the PG red frame’s hands at worst. On a side note, I like how the OYW Gundam has you build the weapons and shield first since by the time I reach the end of the kit I have to really work up the motivation to build the accessories.

Day three. As you can see my workspace is really messy from all the paint but it’s nothing some rubbing alcohol can’t fix up (much like mishaps on the kit). Anyway, Gundam may not have had arms at this point but he wasn’t going to let that stop him from playing with the Hyper Hammer (coolest weapon ever, just FYI). This version of the gundam has tons of panel lines on it, something I like a lot. Really adds to the detail and overall ‘Real Robot’ feel of the kit.

While it looks like I really slacked today, I had to armor and detail the back of the legs before building the arm frames so I did manage to get a little more done than it initally looks like I did. Gundam can now swing his Hyper Hammer merrily about, knocking Zakus and Doms around as he pleases. Something kind of annoying, the handle for the hammer doesn’t have a tab for it so it has a tendency to slide out of the Gundam’s hand if it’s not tilted a bit.

I also got started on my big project! It should have been fairly obvious what I was planning, but here.

With the other kits I’ve painted I’ve done parts of the kit but for the most part left the body alone. With this, I plan on painting the entire kit. Obviously the psychoframe will be metallic blue but I’m still somewhat torn on what color to do the body in. Black is probably really overdone by now (what with the RX-0 Banshee and all), but I’m not sure if metallic grey will do enough to differentiate itself well enough from the normal white version. Regardless of what color I decide to paint it, I managed to get myself a sheet of the waterslide decals and some Mr. Mark setter so I won’t have to stare any any horrible sticker outlines. Along with that, I found some of the Gundam UC volume 4 special editions on ebay (my poor wallet), so I snatched those up as well. Yes, they’ll all be on this model. I have a few other things planned but they’re pretty tenative, so I’ll try not to build anticipation for something that might not happen.

And now for something different. I took this just a bit ago…

The models on this shelf have far more work put in to them than most of the other kits I’ve done (I would dare say that the OYW gundam and Zaku II got more TLC than either of my PG kits, though not more than Sinanju and Unicorn) or are something akin to a milestone in advancing my technique. Ez8 was the first kit I topcoated and weathered, Hi-Nu was the first to recieve panel lining that wasn’t absolutely horrible (Astraea and Dynames really deserve to be redone), Zaku II got heavy weathering and topcoat and was the first model I built how I wanted. 00 got the honor of being the first kit to be handpainted and the still-in the-works RX-78-2 is the first to get a new paintjob entirely. It’s nice to be able to have a timeline to look at for my skill, and I look forward to getting even better with my hobby. After all, everyone wants to improve.

This entry is really starting to drag on, but I’ve been somewhat neglecting the blog this month in terms of WIP content so I wanted to do a big update to kind of throw a lot of stuff out there.

After the UC Custom (I should name it…right?) I kind of want to build a Gundam Mk. II, but use an airbrush and design a real knockout colorscheme instead of just changing the colors of parts. We’ll see, yeah? We’re nearing 1,000 hits, so maybe it’ll be a special project for that.

Long days and pleasant nights!

Storage space aquired…

Saw it in Staples on the way back from work and figured it would be perfect. Turns out, it is! Now I just have to hope my collection doesn’t continue to grow at such a rapid rate!

(The wooden box is typically where I keep unused weapons/beams/ect)

No Hyaku-Shiki today, so hopefully it arrives Monday. Haven’t received shipping confirmation for the White Unicorn, either.

Patience!

Playing Around – Unicorn and Sinanju Review

Update 6/29/09: New review (along with much more recent progress and pictures) can be found here and here.

Big and bad, my fourth and fifth (respectively) MG kits are the biggest and definitely the most challenging models that I’ve done yet. Honestly after these two I feel like I could handle a PG kit without many issues. While I had some fun with them (you’ll see in a bit), I feel like the potential for posing with these kits will skyrocket once I get around to ordering action bases for them. As it stands, I’m slightly limited in what I can do with them. Regardless though, here are some pictures and my (mostly) final thoughts.

WIP – Just kidding, I finished!

I finished with the RX-0 Unicorn Gundam. This was the first time I’ve had to space out the construction of a gundam over a few days, but with this model (and the Sinanju, I’m sure) I think it was for the best I didn’t try to do all those stickers and decals in one sitting. It was enough of a pain to get them done as I went, which wound up holding up the construction of things sometimes.

WIP – Day Two

Analysis so far: I hate stickers and dry transfers. Still.

WIP – 4 Hours Later…

I’ve only hit two one roadbumps so far, so the model has been going at a decent pace. I can tell that if I didn’t have to stop to apply decals I would probably have at least both arms done by now, but I think this kit really looks it’s best when all the stickers and decals are applied. Mine might not look the best (there are a few that are driving me insane) but it’s definitely better than leaving it bare. Originally I had wanted to paint the psychoframe a metallic blue color, but the paint that I had purchase wasn’t behaving like I had hoped so I just left it alone. Practicing techniques is something for a 1/144 or 1/100 NG, not a 80$ MG, you know? I kind of slacked on taking pictures since I was so excited to build this, but I will remember to take more tomorrow while working on it.

Dear HLJ,

I love you.

3 days from japan to lovely ohio! meanwhile, my Tamiya gold leaf paint hasn’t arrived from california yet!

I’ll report back tomorrow with tonight’s progress.

In slightly related news, I preordered the PG Red Frame. I haven’t seen one episode of Gundam Seed, but that suit looks way too cool to have only a 1/100 HG of.