Woody and Buzz never looked so bad-ass!

These toys are the prototype of designer Luis Eduardo Vargas Montoya. I sure hope it gets produced. It’s one helluva collectible set! More photos after the jump…

More photos…

[ source ]

Holy $@%#!

This cool siege tank (made by youtube user petzoldhaus) isn’t just “static”. It can move and even change in and out of siege mode.

Awesome! Awesome! Video after the break…

via [ Geeks Are Sexy ]

Here’s something I did over the weekend last March. I got this Finemolds Tie Interceptor via Ebay for around $25. The detail on the kit is impressive. There were just a few parts and since the Tie Interceptor has a single, major color, it wasn’t hard to paint. Overall, assembly to finished product took around a single weekend (3 days).

More pics…

What’s hard though, were the details on the cockpit and painting the diminutive pilot. After the primer, I airbrushed it with Tamiya Neutral Gray with a touch of blue. Once that dried, a wash of dark gray and some pastel weathering completed the details. I also handpainted and airbrushed Tamiya smoke on various parts such as the side mechanisms and the guns.

I wished I chose a lighter shade of gray since the wash darkened it a bit too dark for my taste.

But I’d say I did a fairly decent job. Not bad for my first Star Wars model kit, eh?

Here are more photos…

Via GM Tristan

Here’s the 3rd and final installment of the completed M1A1 Abrams Tank kit

Just in case you missed it, here’s PART 1 and PART 2 of the work-in-progress for this M1A1 Abrams Tank 1:35 model kit project.

Last week, I stopped the post right after the rust effects. There are only 3 stages left to do; Sand/mud effects, dusting and then the final flat coat.

Sand and Mud

This effect will be applied mostly to the tank wheels and threads. After spraying the wheels with the base color (desert yellow), I handbrush each with Tamiya Flat Black… which is pretty useless since this will all be caked in Iraqi sand later. Oh well, so much for my being OC.

Here are the wheels…

For the sanding effect, here’s the reference photo:

The Iraqi desert is surely unforgiving. To mimic this effect, here’s a nice technique I learned from my online research - Baby powder!

The dust/sand concoction is a mixure of Tamiya Buff (XF-57), White (X-2), baby powder and denatured alchohol. Once you get the consistency of thick milk, you can then apply this to wheels and threads with a medium-sized brush.

Here’s what you get if done properly…

Cool! Just like real desert sand!

Meanwhile, it’s time to put in the threads and then the side armor plating…

Looking good!

Dusting

For more weathering, I just thinned my sand mixture above and lightly mist-spray it on the tank. The dust settles mostly on the sides, front and rear as per my reference photos.

Here it is…

Before applying the dust, I masked the exhaust. I wouldn’t want to waste all the nice exhaust paint I did earlier…

Here it is with the masking below, both in tape and sticky tack for the tail lights.

Once that dried, I painted and did some final detailing on the machine guns… some scratches here and there, and dry brushing effects again…

I let everything dry for 72 hours and gave the entire tank a couple of coats of Tamiya Flat Clear.

Now, let’s see the final kit with the best light source for photography - natural sunlight;

That was a great build. Hope you guys learned a thing or two. Feel free to shoot your questions via the comments below

In  case you missed it here’s

• Part 1 and
• Part 2

Last post we finished at applying Future (Johnson’s Wipe and Shine) to the kit. Now the kit is ready for the decals.

That’s stage 7 of 15.

Still more work to do.

Decal and Detailing

Now that I’ve applied a future coat, the decals will have a nice, gloss base. This makes for better adhesion.

But before that (and while waiting for stuff to dry). I detailed the jerry cans and other accessories first by painting them Olive Drab and then applying a light green drybrush on the edges just to bring out some detail.

Once ready, the cans and ammo boxes were glued to the kit

Next, the water-slide decals were affixed;

Washes

Next up would be a couple of washes to bring out the detail and to add some grime, dirt and muck (weathering) to the tank. No, a wash isn’t “washing” your kit with soap and water.

Basically, a wash is a mixture of paint + thinner (around 10:90) ratio… or the consistency of dirty thinner. Since I used Acrylic paints, it’s important to do your wash with another paint type. For this project, I used an Enamel wash. Pros prefer to use oils.

What you do is just use a medium sized brush and just lazily dab and brush it on. Capillary action will let the paint go into the panels and other details. Wait for it to dry for a few minutes and you can use cotton buds damped with some thinner to take away the excess.

Here’s the effect after the procedure.

Notice how the details now stand out? Quite different from just the base coat a few photos ago, eh?

For that wash, I used flat black.

I apply a second wash of Buff and White once that dried for more weathring and to simulate sand discoloration.

Paint Chipping and Battle Damage

Once the washes were all done, it’s time to apply some paint chips.

Before randomly painting away, it’s important to know how factories painted the tanks in real life. After the base metal, primer is applied. The color is usually grey or a shade of red or maroon. Next would be several coats of the base paint. Logically, when the paint chips, it shows an “onion” type of effect. Here’s a real-life photo on an Abram

There are several methods to do paint chips. My preferred method below:

• Use a small brush and paint out light gray (Sky Grey) outlines on the edges or where you want the paint chips to be (not too much. Don’t overdo it)
• Let it dry for 30 minutes
• Overlay the gray with Olive Drab
• Optional to put some Rust (Nato Brown + Orange) on the chips
• For the bare metal to show, just use an HB pencil and rub it in

Here’s the actual effect once done…

Rust Effects

For my rust mixture, I used Tamiya Nato Brown mixed with Orange and Red. I then applied it via airbrush (with masking) to the tracks and then via hand-brush to some parts. I think the gas tank will have rust so there’s more there…

Whew! That was a long post.

Only 4 more stages to go: Sand/Mud, Dusting and the final flat coat. We’re almost there.

Stick around and visit everyday to check out on the progress of my tank…

Hope you enjoyed! Meanwhile, you can check out some of my other finished model kits below

• M1A1 1:35 Part 1
• Gundam Blitz 1:100 (High Grade)
• 1997 Ford Mustang (unfinished)
• MG06-J Zaku 2 (MG) 1:100
• MG Gundam Destiny 1:100
• Gundam Red Astray 1:100

US M1A1 Abrams tank model kit. From Academy. See how Geekzkrieg builds it!

As promised during my last modeling post about the Gundam Blitz, I worked on my new 1/35 scale M1A1 Abrams during the Lenten break. I had a lot of fun and the entire thing was relaxing and somewhat therapeutic.

The Abrams is the main battle tank of the US armed forces and saw action in Iraq in 2003. The kit is from Academy of Korea and is very nicely detailed with sharp seams and a good fit.

As a bit of trivia, no US M1A1 Abrams was ever destroyed by opposing enemy fire. This beast is the most powerful tank in the world and it’s one of the reasons why I have to have it for my collection, moreso, it being one of my first detailed modern military armor to be assembled.

Work in progress reports and pics after the jump…

The Project

To make it simpler (and to be a little bit organized), I divided the project into major components below

1. Assembly – which included sanding, filing, putty and adjustments
2. Primer
3. Adjustments – the primer will let you see some flaws which you can then “adjust” via sanding or putty later
4. First base coat (desert yellow)
5. Pre-shading with Nato Brown
6. Second base coat (with shading now)
7. Future (floor wax) coat (clear coating to prepare for the decals and wash)
8. Decals
9. Wash 1
10. Wash 2
11. Paint chipping and battle damage
12. Rust Effects
13. Sand effects
14. Dusting
15. Final flat coat

As you can see, there are 15 steps. Each step has a sub-task to it, whew! All-in-all, the project took around 2 weeks from start to finish.

Now, on the progress reports.

Reference Photos

If you want to have a realistic finish on your models, it pays to do a little bit of research. In the old days, you’ll have to buy reference books, magazines, materials or perhaps visit a library. Today, the Internet means that everything you need right is right in your fingertips. That’s one of the advantages of doing this hobby together with technology.

So I yanked out a little elbow grease and did some searching together with my good friend, Google. Here are some of the reference photos that I came up with.

If you notice, you will see the Iraqi desert sand is very unforgiving, it cakes and coats almost everything… I’ll have to take that into account when doing the finishing details for the kit. There’s also an antenna, which doesn’t come with the box. I’ll have to scratch-build that later.

Assembly

Assembly is straight-forward with some flash here and there. All in all, the kit was finely detailed and the instructions were easy to follow. There were some problems on the fit of the top-bottom of the turret assembly but nothing that a little putty and sanding won’t solve.

Here are some pics

Priming Time

The kit, now fully assembled will be primed with Mr. Surfacer 500.

Below is the seam-fit problem of the turret assembly. I used polytuff (or “masilya” for automobiles), let it dry overnight and then sand it away. You can see the ‘before and after’ photos below:

Base Coat and Pre-Shading

Once everything was cool, I then airbrushed the base coat of Tamiya Desert Yellow. It still looks dull and flat at this point and the details won’t stand out (yet). That’s ok… that’s what the other stages of the project are for, washing and weathering later.

Meanwhile, once the Desert Yellow was allowed to dry overnight, I did a little bit of pre-shading with Nato Brown. Pre-shading is a simple painting technique where you airbrush the darker shade (over panel lines and divisions) and then spray over a lighter shade of the base coat to bring out highlights. The final output is a graduated (or gradient) pattern of light, dark and shadow. Cool, huh?

Below are the pics with the pre-shaded Tamiya Nato Brown;

Second Base Coat (shading)

Here’s the second spraying of a slightly lighter hue of Desert Yellow (mixed with white)…

Notice how the panels and the preshaded areas are slightly darker. That’s the effect that I wanted to achieve. So far, so good. The only thing left if for this to dry overnight. The next day, I apply a thin coat of Johnson’s Wipe and Shine (unthinned). This is equivalent to what pro-modelers call “Future”. This protects the model by giving it a coat of acrylic and forming a glossy base for the decals and for the wash.

Don’t worry about the gloss, the wash and weathering will get rid of that later.

For the hull, I airbrushed a coat of Dark Copper followed by Flat Black on the exhaust port to achieve a realistic exhaust and oxidation effect (thank you, reference photos!). Oh yes, this was done before spraying it with Future. I also hand painted the tail-lights Red and the front lights Silver Chrome.

That’s it for Part 1 of this series. Notice that I finished stage 1 through 7. (whew!) There are 8 stages left.

Next up would be applying the decals and finally the wash. That’ll be exciting.

I’ll be updating and uploading pics ASAP, okay?

Via GM Tristan

Hey! This is my latest Gundam build and paint job. Check it out.

This is my 4th Gundam model kit for this year, and my second “China” model. Since these kits cost below $6, they’re good for practice and experimenting with the different techniques I either learned throughout the months I’ve been back in modeling or those gleaned from research over the web.

Check out the work-in-progress (WIP) photos after the break.

For this build, I wanted to do entirely brand new Gundam, without the weathering and scratches. Since the Blitz is a “ninja-type” Gundam, it will logically be without dents or bruises.

This model is the GAT-X207 Blitz, and is one of five initial designs that the Alliance secretly builds with Orb. The Blitz Gundam’s design is geared towards melee combat and stealth missions. Like the other prototype Gundams, the Blitz Gundam is equipped with the new Phase Shift (PS) armor technology. When in Phase Shift mode, the Blitz Gundam is nearly impervious to attacks from shell-firing artillery or melee weapons.

The Build – Construction

Construction, mods and painting took me almost two weeks of working around 2-4 days in a week. Bulk of the work would come in on weekends, of course.

The China kit is horribly designed. It has a LOT of flash and seams and I spent more hours repairing them and sanding than the actual build and paint. You get what you pay for. Sigh.

Let’s check out the photo of the box first

After a lot of sanding and putty work, I finally had the thing ready for assembly after around 4 days. Dang! My arms hurt!

While planning for the project, one of my goals was how to replace the ugly plastic thrusters. When a friend suggested that ballpen caps can be used, I actually tried to see if it’ll work.

Here are several ballpens that you can get for less than P20 each.

Just take away the faux metal casings and you have this. Compare it to the horrendous thruster included in the kit. Much better, eh?

Here’s test-fitting the new thruster! Coolnezz!

Meanwhile, I modded part of the legs to make it “sharper”. It’s actually SIM-card plastic (Gamer Sim), cemented together then I used Water Stop sealant as putty. This was dried and cured for 48 hours before filing, sanding and finishing.

Below: Fully assembled Blitz now ready for painting

Painting

For the paint scheme, I retained the black, red and purple look. Although I used a darker shade of purple compared to the light violet as suggested in the instructions. It kinda looked better.

Before painting, all the parts were washed in a basin with Joy dishwashing cleaner. Time to take a bath!

Washing takes away all the dust and dirt from the sanding as well as oils left in the plastic injection molds.

All the parts were then strained and left to dry

Prepping up for the actual painting, all parts of the same color got separated into individual containers…

Here’s the cast of colors: Flat black for the body, Red for the highlights, Purple for the other armor parts, Yellow for the claws and horns, Neutral Gray for the gun and Titanium Silver for the other metallic parts such as the insides of the legs. All paints were Tamiya except for the purple one, Gunze Sangyo.

After a primer of Tamiya Surface Primer (thinned with lacquer thinner), parts were placed in skewers and airbrushed. This was left to dry and cure for around 48 hours.

Once cured, I assembled the torso, legs and arms separately and gave them all a coat of Tamiya Flat Clear (gloss) in preparation for adding the decals.

Since the kit didn’t come with any decals, I scrounged around my spare-part-bin and used the leftovers from the Zaku. Here are the results

The metal part on the arm is an earing “pakaw” drilled and glued.

Here’s the thruster now…

The shield-gun was masked and painted red and neutral gray. I then masked the divider and painted in white for a cool effect.

Claws were puttied and painted yellow. You can see the other thrusters on the claw assembly

And now for the photos of the finished Gundam Blitz…

For added detail in the shield assembly, I glued an RF Online symbol. I got this from the keychain that we had made as give-aways during LIVE 2008. Hehe.

There you have it! The finished Bltiz. This is currently my favorite Gundam at the moment and I can honestly say that I learned a lot through experience and had fun during the entire process.

Next stop in my modeling project is a 1/35 M1A1 Abrams Tank (the main battle tank of the US Army used in Operation Iraqi Freedom 2003). I’ll be doing that over the Holy Week and hopefully I’ll be posting in-progress updates every now and then.

You’ll have to drop by regularly here to see it.

Peace!

After the weathering and damaging the Zaku, it’s time to do the opposite and have “bling-bling” paint for my new model kit – an AMT/ERTL 1997 Ford Mustang muscle car (1:25 scale).

One of the challenges in doing is kit is trying to be patient. There are a lot of paint layers and they each have to dry and cure before applying the next one. And, like a real car, you have to do perfect priming, examine the body and then do putty jobs, wet sanding and more wet sanding before the actual painting of the body can begin.

After finishing the Zaku project, I worked on the car right away. That was Valentine’s Day, to be exact. Of course, I didn’t forget the wife to trade her for modeling. Well, after a dinner date, I finally went to the workshop and opened the box.

I got this kit off ebay.ph for around P700. Not bad for my first 1:25 model car. Like any modeling project, it’s important to do research. Scouring the web with my good friend, Google, I was able to find some nice real-life reference photos of the 97 Mustang…

The goal is to try to study the actual car to see details such as the engine, the wheels and various paint schemes and colors.

After doing initial research. Here were my options on painting

1. Paint the body with Tamiya spray cans – there were more pastel colors available with this option. The problem is, I’ll prolly burn through 2 to 3 cans with the various layers, and that’s expensive.
2. Using automotive paints – I recently went to Ace hardware to check out automotive spray cans. At around P200 each, it was a viable plan. The option was to “decant” the spray cans and then paint it with the airbrush. I kinda liked the Yamaha Red I bought.
3. Airbrush it with Acrylics – the Tamiya red is kinda pale and bland. Plus, in order to get a metallic finish, I’ll have to spray on a metallic base coat on it before layering in the red. However, I just purchased a metallic blue acrylic for my Mazinger Z kit… that’s also an option. So many choices! Dang!

I’ll worry about painting later, I’ll have to assemble the model first. Let’s check the progress build below…

Feb 14, 2009

The AMT ERTL kit has a lot of “flash”, these are the left-over plastic at the edges from the injection process at the factory. It took me many hours of sanding, filing and various test-fitting just to complete the body and the engine… time which could have been spent on painting. Damn! My arms ached from all that sanding. After sanding, I seprated the small parts into the various colors

After cutting out the parts, it’s time to mask off some of ‘em in preparation for painting…

After sanding, it’s time to wash the body with Joy dishwashing detergent and lotsa water. It’s important not to wipe it with ANYTHING, just allow it to dry naturally. Wiping it with cloth or tissue may leave lint on the body which will damage your paint.

Here’s a shot of the body drying out

Using Tamiya spray cans, I painted the glossy black parts that night. Here’s a shot of the axle

And the engine painted aluminum and semi-gloss black

And look at the cool wheels all chromed out! Woot!

Feb 15, 2009

It’s primer time!

The primer is a mix of Tamiya Surface Primer (great stuff!) thinned with Gunze Mr. Color lacquer thinner.

Primer all done. GM T Tip: Use an old Gatorade bottle with water and blue-tack the body to it as a base for painting.

I let it dry overnight…

Feb 17, 2009

Once the primer dried, it was time to wetsand the body with 1200 grit sandpaper. Here’s the finished product all ready for putty work and the base coat of white… that’s even BEFORE any color is applied. Sheesh!

Meanwhile, it was time to do some putty work on some seams and imperfections. I used Tamiya White Putty purhased at Lils (around P220)

Just apply it using a plastic spatula to the parts. The bumper had a huge seam due the improper fit of the plastic mold

And so did the flooring of the chassis

I let this dry overnight for ultimate curing.

Feb 18, 2009

Tonight, the putty’s all cured and it’s time to for some tedious sanding work. Using a 400 grit sand, I initially trimmed the excess putty away and then wet-sanded it with 1200 finer grit. Here’s the bumper nice and smooth…

Tomorrow or the weekend, it’s time to apply the white base coat and then do the paint layers for the body…

Saturday, Feb 21, 2009

Today, I met friends Alex and Jeff and went to Greenhills. There, we got some paint, took a short trip to the hardware store (Ace) for thinners, sandpaper and bought a German-made Dremel kit for P1,500.00. It’s a great find. I finally have a Dremel (rotary tool) for future projects. We then went to my place to do some serious modeling the entire day. Alex worked on his Slave 1 and Jeff did repairs and re-painting of his MG Exia gundam.

Meanwhile, I did some masking of the car, painted some engine parts and started to do the first two “mist coats” (lightly spraying it over the white coat) for the car body.

Of course, I took tons of pics but I still haven’t uploaded it. I’ll be updating this post sometime this week for more, ayt?

…until then.

GM T

Another weekend… another Gundam! Woot!

 This is now my 3rd Gundam model kit project, after the first China one and the MG Destiny.

Anyways, I’d like to take you through the progress and build process of how I assembled and painted this kit. I got this Zaku from good friend Hector Sagrado who’s also a Gundam model kit builder (and toy addict) and displays some of the kits he’s done at his blog

Meanwhile, let’s begin with the in-progress photo essay…

Background, Plan and Color Scheme

I got this kit around the second week of January and started building it (since I was still building the Destiny) around January 28. I wanted to maintain the color scheme of the Zaku while trying to pattern it after the chipped paint of Boba Fett’s armor, see below:

Since one of my friends, Violent Dream, is building the Slave 1 model kit from Fine Molds, it was a good opportunity to do it together and share the paint costs at the same time.

Meanwhile, here are some shots of the box and the sprues.

Assembly

Assembling an MG kit (Master Grade) is a lot more complicated than an HG (High Grade) Gundam kit. It has a lot more parts, of course. Primarily, most of them belong to the endoskeleton where the armor plates snap to fit. However, it’s a lot more easier to paint them since the armor parts are less and the skeleton holds ‘em together.

It took me a week of working 1-2 hours each day to complete it. I work on a major part every night as soon as get home from work. Here’s the torso after completion:

Since this was going to be a “battle-damaged” Zaku, I then applied damage (by cutting out plastic and drilling holes into the kit) on the shield, arms and legs after full assembly.

The damage was done using a cutter and an electric drill. Too bad, we didn’t have a Dremel rotary tool… that would be have been a helluva lot easier. Well… that’s on my shopping list for February.

After cutting, sanding, and cementing, I finally assembled the full kit. See below:

The good thing about an MG Gundam kit is the articulation. There’s virtually a hundred different poses that you can have your gundam do. All the fingers are also double-jointed and it has an opposable thumb.

Check it out below…

The darn thing can even do hand stands! OMGWTF!

Painting time!

Before paiting, it’s good to map out and plan it out thoroughly. I do this with a vector-based illustration and do some “color-tests” using Photoshop. Basically, you jut get the image off the net (or you can also scan your kit’s intruction manual). Convert the image to Photoshop and start applying some color patterns to it. Here’s what I came up with using that system…

Now that I have a color guide, it’s time to mix ‘em paints. For the greens, it was a double shade using Tamiya Deep Green mixed with Neutral Grey and Black. First, I sprayed the darker shade and applied a lighter shade of it (mixed with white) to do highlights and shading. This is called “pre-shading” which I learned after several research sessions using Google. Woot!

Before painting the armor, I painted the endoskeleton a base of Flat Black first and then highlighted it with Titanium Silver. Check out the result below…

While waiting for that to dry, I then started painting the armor and then the weapons. The first step is to apply a coat of Mr. Surfacer 500 to the all the armor parts. This is a flat primer with a little “grit”. Thin this with lacquer thinner and a few drops of Mr. Retarder. This will make the paint stick better to the plastic and the primer will also cover minor seams and sanding scratches and imperfections. Once the primer dried, the 2 coats of green were applied… darker one first and then the lighter second coat.

After the paint dried and cured, I applied a coat of Tamiya Clear Gloss before applying the decals. The decals will stick better if you apply a coat of clear gloss. Don’t worry. If you don’t want your gundam to look all shiny, you can just clear coat with a matte finish later.

For the paint chips, it looks easier that in seems.

Using a sponge, dab bits of liquid masking solution to the parts then spray it over with the color that you want. I kinda got carried away with the paint chips and it didn’t look logical since Gundams are 60 to 90 feet tall and the chips would have been bigger than a human. Oh well… that was geeky.

Meanwhile, here are some shots after all that painting…

Notice the battle damage on the shields and other parts. To highlight this, I applied a light wash of dark green with black. Since acrylics were used, you have to use enamels for the wash. For the wash, just lightly brush it on the parts and then wipe it off with a cotton bud thinly dipped in thinner.

For the weathering, I added additional scrapes to the paint using the design knife and then lightly drybrushed a lighter shade of green to the armor edges.

More photos:

You might have noticed the “flames” coming out from the missile pod. I thought it was a great time to apply that technique using what I found over at Armorama.

It’s made with some cotton balls, glue and an old sprue.

Just glue the cotton ball to the sprue, then color it yellow, apply red to it and then finally some tufts of black for the smoke. Once done, just super glue one of the missles (which I cut out from the pod) onto the end, stick it in the pod and you have a cool effect…

Here are some more photos of the completed Zaku…

That’s it for now… will post some more photos once I get to getting shots in the daytime (which are better, of course).

I just got two more model kits recently. I think I’ll take a break from Gundams first to try out other kits. I got the Fine Molds Star Wars Tie Interceptor 1/72 kit and also an AMT-ERTL 1997 Ford Mustang 1/25 muscle car. Both I got from Ebay. The Tie Interceptor is a steal at P1,500 and the car is around P700 bucks. I’ll still be making gundams after these two. I just wanted to try and do the techniques I learned from the net.

Stay tuned…

Check out the progress photos and step-by-step of our new Gundam project – the 1/100 MG Gundam Destiny!

A couple of weeks ago, I just completed the “China-version” of my Gundam Astray 1/100. And yes, that was good practice. It was all painted with Tamiya aerosol cans. Once I got to compute the cost of these, it was more prudent to invest in an airbrush set. The good airbrushes like Iwata or Badger start out at $100 or so and that’s without the compressor. Not considering ourselves pros at the moment, I invested in a basic Tamiya Sprayworks set (see photo later). It comes with a standard, top-fed can and it has its own compressor. Right now, me and my pals used it on a couple of projects and we’re satisfied.

Now, on to the Destiny MG 1/100 project.

This is my first Master Grade REAL Gundam and of course, I don’t have a very high expectation for it (but I don’t want to screw it up either). The goal is to practice all those that I read and researched over the net and they say that “practice makes perfect”. In time, I want to improve painting, detailing and weathering techniques so that I apply something new when I buy the next kit.

So far, shopping for the tools, items and accessories for modeling has been so much fun. I really enjoyed gathering all the stuff and neatly packing them into my plastic bins and containers.

Jan 21, 2009

I got the kit last week and I start the first couple of nights assembling, cutting and sanding the pieces. Every night I try to finish a part like the torso, both arms, legs, wing and weapons. It took me the entire week to assemble the kit since I only work on it a couple of hours a day. Gotta be fast next time.

Meanwhile, here’s the box of the Destiny and what’s inside.

MG kits are a bit harder to assemble since they have a gazillion parts. What’s good about MG kits are that a) they are fully poseable, much like Revoltech toys and b) they have an endoskeleton where you just put the armor plating on top. It seems daunting at first.

Here’s the pre-assembled model. I will have to take this apart for painting. The good thing about pre-assembling is that you PLAN for the colors, the weathering and sometimes you’ll see the need where to mask off items for painting. You also get to “QA” your kit to see if there are nip/nib marks visible and other stuff that you need to adjust like seams, etc.

Here’s the Destiny after the snap-build. As you can see, I make the head for last. I call it my “crowning glory” and is sort of a reward for all my efforts.

The wings and the weapons are also pre-assembled and ready for priming.

Jan 23, 2009 (Friday)

After the pre-assembling, I dissamble them all again and arrange the parts correspondingly for painting. Just get a similar container and label them with tape and marker. All this organization will save you a lot of time going through the manual and figuring out which part goes where.

First I spray-painted the endoskeleton using Tamiya gunmetal (can). After it dried, I applied a drybrush of Chrome Silver to the details.

Does the paint harden the joints in your kits? Here’s a tip – put BluTak putty on ‘em. It’s easy to remove once the paint dries and the joints will slide on better.

Now, I skewer all the parts with sticks, arrange them according to color and put them on styro foam. My plan is to go from light to dark, painting the armor first (light grey), then the wings red and then the black parts. For this project, there wasn’t much color modification. I just changed all the blue to black for a tri-color effect.

Using double sided tape for the flat parts makes painting them easier. See below.

And now for the actual painting. Here’s the new Tamiya Spray Work set that I bought for around $120. Time to make the investment pay off, bitches.

The first layer would be the primer. I used a Mr. Surfacer 500 (from Gunze) thined with lacquer thinner. Mr. Surfacer would hide and conceal all the sanding marks and the little seams and cracks of the kit.

Here’s the wing all coated up with Mr. Surfacer.

After drying and curing for 3 hours (I worked on the weapons while waiting). It was time to actually paint the parts. The nozzle was set to ‘medium’ and sprayed at around 5 to 7 inches away from the parts. Drying time was supposed to be around 1 to 3 days (I found that out after I was done with the project). The colors were Tamiya enamels mixed with Tamiya enamel thinner. Base colors of Red, White + black + blue (for armor), Black, GunMetal and Yellow were used.

Here’s the wing after drying and final assembly.

I then re-assembled the Destiny and there were still some spots that I plan to hand-paint in the following day. Of course, I still haven’t applied the decals and the panel lines yet. Here’s a photo;

Here’s the Destiny almost 90% done. All that’s left are more details, panel lining, some weathering and touching up by hand.

Lessons Learned

Every kit is a learning experience. I’m no pro but my goal is to learn something new for every modeling project and I’d like to share it with you. Here are some of the things I learned from this one.

• Assemble everything – don’t leave small parts in the sprues. I found this the hard way and had to mix paint (costs money) just for the little stuff.
• Enamel dries and cures – “Drying” means that the actual enamel paint is dry. That takes around a couple of hours to a day depending on how thick your coat it. But “curing” is actually a different thing. Enamel paint cures from 2 to 5 days. How do you know it’s cured? Simple – when the paint doesn’t feel goey or tacky. That’s the time to apply detail and decals.
• Too much top coat – I got excited with spraying again. The amount of top coat left the gundam with a dusty like surface. I’ll just tell my friends it’s my “dust weathering” technique. Yah right!
• Patience - modeling requires patience. You can’t have it overnight. Good model kits take time. If you don’t have patience, this hobby might not be for you. I’m trying to really control the urge to finish. Sloppy and rushed work, however small, shows… and shows bad.

Hope you guys enjoyed and learned something. More photos to follow upon update.

A more better Gundam in the weeks to come.