[CrossXhunteR]

Started the Graze custom today,while trying different methods for dealing with nubs using the x-acto knife a lot more. Managed to cut myself and bleed on the pieces though,which along with needing to cook dinner made me only finish the torso tonight.

[CrossXhunteR]

Hot pics of the Barbatos that I assembled over the weekend, along with work on my next kit, the Graze Kai.






I also ended up getting the Hyakuren and the Hyakuri.

[CrossXhunteR]

I got my brother to get a HG Deathscythe Hell. It should come in on Friday. I'll try to post pics of his build too.

[LiQuid]

What the hell is your brother fucking around with Gundam toys for. Doesn't he have a girlfriend?

[kenzo]

Yeah, you should get his girlfriend some gunpla too! It's only courteous!

[CrossXhunteR]

HG Nobell Gundam? Or is that sexist?

[kenzo]

Those are expensive.

[CrossXhunteR]

Yeah, I looked it up after mentioning that, and both the regular and berserker version are $50+

[kenzo]

I bought a bunch of enamel paints on a whim to do some detailing work on my Gunpla; specifically for the ZZ which basically requires it if you want it to look like the pictures. Problem is, looking into how to use them and there's a lot of issues. Specifically, apparently the thinner you use for enamel paints (and you basically have to use thinner) eats away at plastic, causing the plastic to get brittle and break. That's awful! It's less of a thing apparently if you're spray painting, because a lot of the thinner basically evaporates before it even hits the model, but otherwise yeah... This is kinda discouraging! I guess my alternative is to just say cest la vie or turn to acrylics, which at this point I think I give up.

Cross, you should make some sanding sticks with your good sandpaper, and then just go to town on your piece you fucked up to get it silkysmooth. It'll take a lot of sanding, but you should be able to fix it. Just remember, only 1 direction!

[CrossXhunteR]

As I mentioned in Discord and on Twitter, I worked on one of the arms of my Graze Kai last night and was super dissatisfied with how some of the pieces turned out. The shoulder is comprised of two gray pieces locking together with a white piece on either side. Nub and stress marks show up real well on the grey of the inner pieces, and I was having great issues trying to remove some of these marks. I feel like it actually got worse as I tried to fix it, so I just decided to stop at some point and stew on it, so as not to make it even worse than I already had made it.

I really don't like how these two pieces that make up the shoulder were connected to the runner in the middle of a flat face. Makes it very hard to hit with sanding, and I did not want to gouge it with my knife.

Calling my sandpaper good might be an overstatement. I will try this out tonight though, with probably either my 1000 or 2000 grit. I think I have one or two grits higher than that, but I don't know if that would be necessary. The pieces of this are so small it makes it hard to hold and sand in one direction. Not much room to actually push or pull the sand paper/stick.

Just to clarify about what is meant when saying sand in one direction. That means only pushing OR pulling in the same plane, not just working in the same plane going both ways, right?

[CrossXhunteR]

Finished assembling the Graze Kai today. Main pic below, with a few more angle hidden behind the spoiler. I actually plan on putting him on a stand and replicating the pose from the box.

Starting the Hyakuren next.

Spoiler: show

[kenzo]

Dat Skittles placement doe... Man after my own heart

[CrossXhunteR]

They say share size. That was found to be a lie.

[CrossXhunteR]

[kenzo]

I looked it up, and apparently Ronsonol is now just Zippo lighter fluid in disguise, since being bought out by Zippo. This apparently gets some people pissy b/c they used the old formula for Ronsonol for cleaning things like guitars, and now that would be a bad idea for your finish.

[kenzo]

Hey, updates! I'm building again! Gunpla is still freedom!

I started working on my Mk II. This really is a gorgeous kit and very detailed. The inner frame has crazy details you'll never see unless you do some kind of intricate battle damage or something. Take this here - this is the cockpit/emergency eject ball thing that a lot of UC mechs have (unless your mech is designed around a core fighter instead of an ejectable cockpit):



I got a lot of the torso's inner frame up and made last night. Tonight I finished the torso and head unit, and did all the panel lining. I even did panel lining on the interior parts just to practice technique. Here's the torso:



And here's the head attached. Speaking of panel lining, I tried the panel wash technique, and I'M NEVER GOING BACK TO GUNDAM MARKERS. Holy cow does this panel washing technique give fuckin' good results:



It took me a while to get the hang of it, but it's not exuberantly hard or skillful. You just gotta have the right equipment (which isn't much), a somewhat steady hand (which ultimately needs to be less steady than with the markers), and have your paint thinned properly. The lighter fluid works pretty well, and if you do things right, the cleanup is easier than with markers too. There's one more bit that got made, a detachable head-attachment that gives the Mk II a vulcan cannon:

[CrossXhunteR]

For the vents on the torso and the side of the head, how do you do those with the panel wash? Do you just let it pool in there and try to thin it out/clean it up afterwards?

Also, the eyes on that look super cool.

[Jenn04]

Holy crap the panel wash looks fantastic!! The head is so hard to do cleanly with markers, but with the wash you did it masterfully! I'm gonna have to get this stuff.

[LiQuid]

Kenzo gonna be building gigantic dioramas p. soon.

[kenzo]

For the vents on the torso and the side of the head, how do you do those with the panel wash? Do you just let it pool in there and try to thin it out/clean it up afterwards?

Also, the eyes on that look super cool.

So, I don't know what you mean by the vents on the torso. If you mean the big yellow vents, I actually didn't touch those. Most of the kits I've made so far with chest vents, the yellow pieces are single pieces with vents that are kinda shallow. Here with the MG Mk II, the vents are actually separate pieces with no backing, that rest on an inner frame part that has another set of vents. The yellow vents are also big and deep enough that I don't feel pressured to simulate stark shadowing b/c it casts its own well done shadows.

The inner vents though (and you can see them on the first pic above the red spherical cockpit) I did put some panel wash into as well, but it's not very noticeable (since you can barely see the piece underneath the outer vents). That said, yes, you can just drop paint in there and then brush it to clean it up. The same was for the 'vents' on the head, which was really easy and simple. The capillary action used to draw the paint through the panel lines works the same along other crevasses like right angles. So take the black lines on the side of the head where the vents stick out, those aren't grooves, but the paint pulled along the sides of those right angles just fine, and produced much better results versus a marker where I'm always slipping my hands at those places.

The Mk II does the thing good Gundam designs do, where it kinda has sort of a visor thing going on for the brow above its eyes, and that way depending on the positioning of the head, you can make the Gundam look like it has different emotions while nothing has physically changed. So like, if you want the Gundam to look nonthreatening or adventurous or even jovial, have the head tilted up or the camera aiming up like so:



And if you want it to look menacingly or angry or serious etc, you aim the head down or have the camera angle down, like so:



The G-Self does this effect pretty well too. But some designs are silly like the 00 which is just angry all the time.

Holy crap the panel wash looks fantastic!! The head is so hard to do cleanly with markers, but with the wash you did it masterfully! I'm gonna have to get this stuff.

Do it, Jenn! It's super cheap and easy. I've got 1/4th oz bottle of Testors black enamel paint that's going to be more than enough for the forseeable future. It cost like $2. A 'small' thing of lighter fluid (again, more than enough for this, and for painting, touch-ups, and cleaning paintbrushes) cost $2.50. A small, cheap, synthetic brush. Then it's just a matter of having like a disposable pipette (can literally buy hundreds lab-grade pipettes on Amazon for a few bucks) to pull paint out of the little bottle, and then using whatever as a mixing plate. I could probably use a bottle cap tbh. Its easy, cheap, and works really well. You gotta do it, mang!

Kenzo gonna be building gigantic dioramas p. soon.

There's a hobby store nearby that I got my paints at, and the whole store is dedicated to JUST model trains. (At one point in the past they were more diverse, but it seems ppl didn't buy those other varieties of models and paints. It's kinda obnoxious to see things like Tamiya brand paints in the window display, or advertising other types of models and then the ppl inside be like "sry, we don't have those no more" but I digress.) And I'd say 3/5ths of this actually kinda big model store is dedicated to making big-ass dioramas for ppls train sets, and I would never get into that b/c it's so expensive and so much work and most importantly, takes up so much extra space. Like, I have 5 finished kits so far. I don't have enough space to display more tbh. I wouldn't be able to handle having giant dioramas for each. If I was going to dump absurd amounts of time and money into this hobby, I'd sooner take up painting the kits rather than that.

[kenzo]

Mk II Backpack GET:



Weapons GET:

[CrossXhunteR]

I do not like the look of the vulcan cannons on the side of the head unit.

BTW, this was the kit I saw at my local shop the other day, that was similar to the Hyaku Shiki. Apparently some seller is offering them quite a bit cheaper than normal prices on Amazon right now, along with a few other kits. They don't have too many ratings, or the best score either.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0052PEUCW/ref=cm_sw_su_dp

Edit: That price is no longer listed. The seller name was "Select shop in Japan. Are you worried about buying japanese items from countries other than japan? Our Japanese staff will send you with care."
It was showing up as $25 earlier, which the Jesta is still showing. Their Amazon reviews do mention "pricing errors" and cancelled orders.

[kenzo]

Mother fucker I knew it was the Delta Plus

[CrossXhunteR]

You may have tried to confirm that with me, but I didn't know what the Delta Plus was.

[kenzo]

I remember in the /gunpla/ thread that people been complaining about some Amazon seller listing kits super cheap and then canceling orders and such b/c of pricing errors. Don't waste ur time with these chucklefucks.

[kenzo]

Cross wanted progress pics. I dunno why I gotta post pics when he hasn't posted pics in longer than I have, but whatevs.

Finished the Mk II's sheild a while ago. As a sheild, it's... I dunno, not the greatest? It just looks kinda boring to me. The yellow there is stickers. They're high quality stickers in that they fit perfectly and don't look to have the same peeling issues my Master Gundam is currently having, but they're stickers nonetheless. I'd paint those details but we all know my position on painting. It should look less boring later when I add the decals.


One thing worth noting about the shield is that it semi-transforms in that you can shorten it. It does this in the show too. Why though? I honestly can't give you a compelling reason why you'd ever have it shortened except maybe for long-term storage.


One last thing to note about the shield is the inside. Those two pods on the top are extra ammo clips for the Mk II's rifle. That's kind of a neat feature I guess. There's also a lot of geometric shapes on the inside that should probably be panel lined, but I'm not going to. Nobody looks at the inside parts of these kits, and it's actually kinda hard to do these specific panel lines here. Like, I tried, and just ended up washing it away b/c it was hard to make it look good.


Here's the Mk II with its Right Arm attached. You should be able to see some lines on the inside of the forearm; that's a mistake. A mistake I can't erase easily. I'm considering whipping out my white paint and doing some touchups. I was trying to panel line a very thin edge there, and fucked up. Then I redid it in Gundam marker and fucked up again. But that's also a seam where I used plastic cement, and for whatever reason, the ink in Gundam Marker seeps into the plastic that's been melted by plastic cement and stains it like a tattoo or something, so that mark won't go away. It's a bummer.


Xmas came early, and these are the two kits I got myself for the holidays, an F91 and a Qubeley:

Both are choice mechs. The F91 is gonna look a little goofy next to all the other kits though. IIRC, the F91 is supposed to be 15.5 meters or so, when other kits like my ZZ or Turn-A are in the 20m range. The rad thing about the F91 doe, is that it comes with its own action base. And that action base is in the form of a giant mecha tentacle monster:


I swear to god there's actually good reasons for its design! But it's still amazing for ironic purposes as well. I might need to get a Super Fumina or a Nobell Gundam just for yucks.

Also, bonus kitty pic!

[CrossXhunteR]

Finished my Hyakuren tonight, but will wait til tomorrow to post some pics. Going to the hobby shop to pick up some more sanding sticks and some action bases for my HGs.

[CrossXhunteR]

The HG Kyakuren I did last weekend, on the action base 2 I built today. In the background is one of the kits I got the other day at my local comic shop, the GM from Thunderbolt

Still haven't done any panel lining, but I did order some paint and picked up some lighter fluid to attempt the panel wash technique that Kenzo has moved on to. Paint will take a bit to ship though.

[kevinep3]

It's finally here.

[kenzo]

Kevin, look at that shitty, cheap, monotone box... I think u got ripped off with a knockoff, man. U should mail that to me and I'll dispose of it for u.