Complete - RG Hi-v Gundam

 

The king of all Real Grade Gunpla, the Hi-v (pronounced "high nu") Gundam! Working on this kit has been fantastic. The quality and build experience were truly amazing in ever aspect. The color separations were flawless and had an amazing level of detail that tests the limits of a 1/144 scale Gunpla.

I've started working on this kit little over a year ago and I finally completed it recently. It really shouldn't have taken this long but life has been quite busy so it took much longer than it should have (really should have taken about 3 months).

It's been a slow process but it was really fun watching it come together piece by piece.

Though I did enjoy the process, the sheer amount of pieces in this kit was staggering. I might take a long break from doing another RG kit for a while.

It was quite amazing though that I still managed to maintain this level of articulation even after painting. This is truly the power of Bandai engineering!

And as with every version and variation of the v (nu) Gundam, the most painful part is the funnels. There are 6 of them with 2 identical parts to each funnel. Everything from sanding to painting really tested my patience.

In any case, please enjoy the full album in the link below and the youtube video on the bottom of the album.

Click here for the full album

Complete - HG Cybaster

 This was a particularly exciting project for me. Cybaster has been one of my favorite mechs since I was a little kid. Naturally, I got super excited when I heard that Bandai was making a HG kit for it.

To celebrate Super Robot War's 30 year anniversary, Bandai released this kit last year as part of their new HG lineup. More recently, my other favorite mech of all time, Alteisen, was also released and Gespenst is coming little later this year.

In the past, Kotobukiya released a few Cybaster model kits but at the time, I didn't quite know where to reliably find model kits. (also, I was a poor student)

Though Bandai's version definitely feels a bit lacking in certain places, I'm overall very happy with the quality of the kit.

Click here for the full album

Complete - HGCE Destiny Gundam "Big Game"

 I started this project as a birthday gift for a friend. He's likes the design of the Destiny Gundam and he's also a fan of the Lakers. So the obvious thing to do was to paint a Destiny in Lakers colors.

I was originally going to use the old HG Destiny that I built more than 10 years ago. I really wanted to see how much detail-up I can do on a really old kit. Unfortunately, the kit started crumbling into pieces as soon as I started cleaning it. I ended up just buying the renewed version - HGCE Destiny.

Isn't he handsome? I also considered getting the RG but the proportions on it felt weird. I'm glad I went with the HGCE instead.

I don't think I've ever built a HG kit with this many pieces. The final assembly took about 1.5 hours.

Click here for the full album

Happy Holidays!

 

EG Kirby

 Got a new camera! Decided to test it out while painting an Entry Grade Kirby.

Click here for full album

SDEX Strike Freedom + Haropla Haro

Tried my hand at doing a small little kit bash using a Haro and a SD Strike Freedom. Made this as a birthday gift for a friend who really likes Haro.

Click here for full album

Side Projects Complete - Plamax Sheryl Nome and Kotobukiya ASRA Ninja

From time to time while waiting for acrylic paints to cure, I've been slowly working on a few side projects. Ever since I finished the Dark Knight kitbash, I've been focusing mostly on finishing up the remaining work for those two projects.

Side Project 1: Plamax Minimum Factory - Sheryl Nome

I've randomly came across this kit while I was traveling Japan in 2018. It's a really basic small kit with very few pieces.

Here's another picture to get a good idea on how small it is:

That Ralphs card is about the same size of a credit card.

I've been interested in learning how to paint human figures for quite some time now so I figured this would make a great practice before jumping into resin garage kits.

Oof. Turns out "small" means harder to mask and paint in the details while "less piece" means more masking. I also painted this in acrylic, making the whole masking and detailing process more complicated.

I had some thoughts about using magnets in my builds for some time so I thought it would be fun experimenting with some small magnets in this kit. I got a few 2mm and 3mm diameter magnets and planted them in the kit.

The magnet wasn't going to really hold the pieces in a meaningful way besides for test fitting. In hindsight, I could have planted more than one magnet on each side of the joints to make the magnetic force stronger...

After some intense sessions of adding details, everything was finished.

Side Project 2: Kotobukiya Megami Device - ASRA Ninja

This was a very fun project and was also a huge learning experience too. While the Sheryl figure got me a taste of shading practice of skin and hair, it was really too small to get much meaningful experience. While Megami Device line are quite small too, they were just big enough to get some real practice.

It might be a bit hard to see but I managed to put some lighter tone highlights on the hair in the picture above. I'm quite satisfied with how the hair pieces came out but the skin tone will need some more practice in the future to get the shading really right.

I've also decided to play around more with magnets.

Pictures above are notes I took on where to add magnets. I basically went in and filled every 3mm joints with magnets.

I further put metal etch parts on the finished paint job to indicate where the magnets are planted (also thought it looked cooler this way).

Unfortunately, once again the magnets proved to be too weak to really to hold up the pieces in a meaningful way. I also realized having a single point of magnetic force meant the orientation of the pieces become hard to control. These were all very valuable learning experience for my future magnet shenanigans.

In any case, you can find the full albums for the two side projects here:

Click here for the full album of Minimum Factory Sheryl Nome

Click here for the full album of Megami Device ASRA Ninja

Complete - HG Shadowbringers Dark Knight

 This one took roughly about 4 months. Been busy so I only got to work on it little by little each day (at a much slower pace than the previous projects).

This was the first time trying scratch build and kit bash. It didn't quite turn out as I originally imagined but I did learn a lot.

• Do not mix mechs from different era/worlds without checking proportions first
• Do not make your scratch builds thin (use multiple layers of pla-plates)

And more.

One thing that really bothers me is the poor choice of color for the purple and gold. Really wish I used a darker tone of purple to give it a more drab feeling. The gold was also too bright. I contemplated between the one I used (Tamiya Gold Leaf) and Tamiya Titanium Gold and...

 In any case, use link below for full album and build video:

Click here to see full album

Preview - HG Dark Knight (original)

 Here's something I've been slowly working on the past couple months.

Finished priming and making final checks.

Complete - Kotobukiya Siren

The Siren is complete. This one took about 2.5 months. This time around, I worked mainly using lacquer paints so I've been able to work non-stop every day without waiting for paint to fully cure between layers.

Instead of writing up a blog post of each progress, I tried something different this time.

I made a video of the progress instead. This... was much harder than I thought. Modern day video editing tools do not run very well with only 8 gigs of RAM. Not sure if I'll do this for my next project but please enjoy.

Please also check the link below for the finished product album.

Click here to see the full album

Preview - Kotobukiya Siren (Xenoblade Chronicles 2)

 I haven't updated the blog in a while but I've been working non-stop on my next project. In fact, the project is already finished but I'm trying something new so I'll need a bit more time before I post pictures of the completed work here.

In any case, here is a quick preview:

Photos above were taken before the painting. It took about 2 months to complete the entire project (including pre-painting prep work).

Complete - MG Char Custom Zaku II (1/12/21)

Panel Line Scribing

To add color separation to some of the parts, I can just mask off and paint but I figured this may leave unclean edges. So instead, I decided to scribe some panel lines where the color separation will happen.

Painting

Once the scribing was finished, I primed all the outer armor pieces with a surfacer.

The surfacer helped identify flaws from scribing mistakes. After fixing up the identifiable flaws, I went ahead and painted the parts I wanted red.

Once the red parts cured, I masked them off along the panel lines and painted the remaining parts in two different tones of black.

The flat black in the bottom picture is supposed to be a mixture of black and a little bit of white to lighten up the tone. I did this to create a two-tone look to give a more interesting color variation to the kit.

Enamel Detailing

Before adding the details, I applied glossy top coat layer to all the pieces. This process helps protect the color layers from getting damaged from the enamel paint and the glossiness also helps with the enamel washing (it is harder to clean the excess enamel off matt surfaces).

Once the top coat layer cured, I moved on to adding details using enamel paint.

Decal Decal Decal

To add some extra flare, I got some generic waterslide decals and applied them around the pieces.

The real fun part started with the custom decals.

I used Illustrator to create vector images (traced) for the FFXIV themed custom decal. In the picture above, we have the Maelstrom emblem (spent hours drawing this and ended up not using this one because I found a high-res image later...), Meteor icon, random ornament tracing from the game, and a Maelstrom captain symbol.

I then printed the images on a transparent decal paper.

After the inks dried, I added a top coat layer to protect the ink from getting soaked in the water later.

I waited for the top coat to cure then carefully sliced the decals out as close as possible to the edges of the images.

Once applied, the decals came out nicely on the brighter backgrounds (like on the red sleeves in the image above). But the ones that went on the black pieces didn't work out as nice.

The problem here is that a regular household inkjet printer does not print using white ink. This means that it relies on the white color of a generic printer paper for the printed color to look right. As you can see in the image above, this becomes a problem when I apply the emblem printed on a transparent decal on black surface.

To remedy the situation, I got some white decal paper and tried the whole process again.

The result (emblem, rank, warrior symbol) came out much better with the white decal paper. Though the challenge here is that I had to trim the decal perfectly to the edge of the printed images. This is generally easy but it also becomes a bit of a challenge when dealing with more complex images like the meteor symbol. For this particular decal, I ended up just using the transparent decal and painted a portion of the surface in a bright chrome color so that the color of the decal will look right.

Once all the decals dried, I sealed them all with a final layer of top coat (gloss finish on the metallic colors and matt finish on everything else).

Metal Etching

For this particular kit, I wanted to try something new I haven't tried before so I got myself these:

I got myself some metal etching to add some extra detail on the chest of the mech. I could have applied this as-is but I wanted to give it a yellowish tint first. Unfortunately, I can't just go ahead and apply clear yellow paint on the metal etching pieces as it will easily peel off. So I got myself a metal primer.

After applying the metal primer on etchings and letting it cure, I went ahead and applied some clear yellow on top.

Once the paint cured, I sealed it with top coat and glued them on using super glue.

Note that the super glue was applied in very small amount using a tooth pick. This is because super glue does not evaporate as it cures but instead just hardens in place. As such, we want to avoid using excess glue as any overflow will leave a visible mark on the surface.

Oops Forgot The Weapon

As I was starting to get excited to do the final assembly, I realized I forgot to paint the axe.

At this point, I was getting impatient so I brought out the lacquer paints.

As always, the first layer is glossy black base.

For the overall color, I used star bright iron (Gaia Metallic Color series).

I masked off everything but the blade, handle, and bottom pommel and painted them with bright silver candy base (Alclad II).

The nice thing about this particular silver paint is that it doesn't require a glossy black base underneath so I am able to paint it right over the iron color.

In the picture above, you can also see that I added a layer of clear red on top as well. My goal here was to add a very thin layer of clear red and add a thicker layer of clear yellow afterwards to create a gold color. unfortunately, the clear red was accidentally applied much thicker than I wanted.

As a result, the final color came out closer to bronze but I figured it was good enough.

Once the lacquer paints cured, I added a glossy clear top coat and started adding details.

I used enamel for the copper but I did not have any red and brass enamel for the rest. I carefully used the metallic yellow Gundam marker for the bolts (I recently learned that these are all lacquer). For the circles on the blade, I used water-based acrylic red to paint over the general area.

Once the red paint dried a bit, I performed an acrylic wash in a similar way to enamel wash. Instead of enamel paint, I used acrylic paint and instead of lighter fluid, I used water. Because the layer of lacquer topcoat underneath was so resistant to water, I was able to perform the wash cleanly.

Final Assembly - Maelstrom Zaku

Once all the final top coat layers cured, I was ready for the final assembly.

And the first step of assembly is... disassembly.

Once all the major parts were separated, I started adding the armors to the frame.

And to reassemble the previously separated parts...

Complete!

Click here to see the full album

Today I Learned

• Matt finish can make subtle two-tone color schemes hard to distinguish so try to make the different color tones less subtle
• Lighter fluid can eat through even lacquer if exposed for a long time so it's better to use a protective top coat before doing enamel wash even when using lacquer (forgot to take pictures but this happened while working on the axe and had to restart it from beginning)
• Transparent decal paper does not work well on dark surfaces (better to use white decal paper)