2012 in review

Hello! It has been some time I know and as you may have noticed it has been the festive time of year (again, I don't know how it happens every year around this time its weird..). Thought I would take this opportunity to say I hope you all had a nice Christmas, and to have yourself a awesome new year.

I have been spending lots of time with the family, and working steadily on an MG Rick Dias (WIP will eventually be posted, probably next weekend or something).

2012 has been a special year for me, it's the year I think I have learned the most about the art of Gunpla. This year I have learned how to airbrush, learned about paint types, thinners, modifications and seam line removal and am of course, still learning with each experience. Most of what I have learned has come from the awesome people in the gundam community across the world, so here are a few youtube channels I would like to mention who have helped me (and could help you too if you don;t know about them already!) along in some way this year:

deezipp3011
TheGunplameister
vegeta8259
crapmunky99
enensis
NigelTehTianHong
Kamniks
sneeper1980
mokanaman

I would also like to thank everyone on the mecha lounge who's advice has been invaluable :) I also completed watching nearly every Gundam anime that has ever been made, apart form superior defender which is just a steaming pile of shit. Patlabor next.. :)

Heres a quick vid update, the last of 2012!

Happy new year to you all and see you in 2013!

Ryurai Kai Suppression Vanguard custom

Took around 5 weeks to complete, on and off of course interspersed with family life and activity. All-in-all I really like the design of this model, it has a real chunky, thick-armour feel and is the closest match to what I can only describe as a walking tank!

The addition of the gatling gun was a bit of a whim, but it did give me the idea to call it the "suppression vanguard  with the idea of this machine being a pure, frontline mech with artillery and ballistics combined. Its heavy armour would make it ideal for initialising battlefield operations by laying down a spray of gatling cannon bullets along side long-range artillery, enabling other forces for drive forward with less challenge.

In summary, assembly was easy and straightforward, the inner frame gets very loose, very quickly and the model does suffer a lot from "droop". The additional armour bits are really cool, although I kind of ran out of steam to detail those parts properly so they returned to the box where perhaps future frame arms will utilise them. Would I get another frame arms model? Yes, if i like the design of course. Some final pictures below:

Chaos - a new mecha lounge contest for 2013!

Quick one everyone - The mecha lounge have just announced the details for next years competition, off the back of the massivly huge and awesome mecha 2012 this year.

Something a little different this time - not a competition but a "group build", this taken from the mecha lounge:




CHAOS GB
Collectively Hoarding Astronomically Over-priced Styrene

The world plunges into war as the fight for resources becomes too great. As chaos descends upon humanity two factions were formed those who would choose to inhabit the air and space, those who would choose to inhabit the land and sea. The colony's prepare for what will come to be known as the Great War, in which only one colony will survive and lay claim to Earth's resources. We would like you to choose your side and build your own personal war machine for the Great War and aid your colony to victory. The rules follow!:

GROUNDED COLONY OR SKY COLONY

- First choose your side (Grounded or Sky)
- You may build any kind of model kit for your chosen side for example. You may choose the Grounded Colony and build a Zoid, Gundam, Tank, Boat, Figure etc.
- All we ask is you try to paint / modify / build your model kit to match your chosen Colony. E.g. for the Sky Colony you may build your model with numerous thrusters etc.

- This is not a competition. This group build is for fun and we will be announcing prizes for lucky winners and participants throughout the event! We want to encourage everybody to take part regardless of skill level and just have fun together. You may build models for more then one colony and again this event allows for almost any kind of build so if your looking for an excuse to work on your back log! now is the time.

- Deadline will be January 1st 2013 - June 30th 2013
- You can enter More then one model into the group build and dioramas are accepted!
- Prizes will be announced during the GB to keep the excitement rolling.

So what will it be!? who will you choose to fight for? and what will you choose to fight with!? (more information will become available over the next two weeks)

So.. what are you waiting for? Check out the mecha lounge now, sign up, and get ready for the biggest plamo and gunpla ruck ever! Waaaarrrr!!

http://kamm-mecha.com/mechaloungeforums/index.php?topic=1536.0

Late November Gunpla Update

Hello Gunplanatics! It's been an action packed weekend of blowing up balloons, wrapping presents and putting up decorations in celebration of my sons 3rd birthday, so not much Gunpla wise has actually happened. Despite that, I did receive some new things from HLJ, and purchased some amazingly awesome things in the recent sales, even though I can't really afford it.

Anyways, here is a short video of me rambling in your face about stuff:

Ryurai kai continues this coming weekend with some detailing, panel lining and decalling. Should have it all wrapped up pretty soon.

Ryurai Kai - WIP 3

Quite a productive weekend this for a change, well, that and I had a lovely day off work on Wednesday and spent it all painting. All airbrushing now completed.

Managed to do a lovely Norwegian flag on one of the shoulder armour parts - take a look in the video below which is mostly me unmasking things.. :)

With a little luck, should have this completed by next weekend. Got to give it a gloss coat, do some decal work and some panel lining, then we're done :)

Ryurai Kai - WIP 2

With a rudimentary thought of colour scheme now figured out, the work on painting and slightly modifying has begun. I decided to make the grey parts a light blue, with a shading of royal blue. On top of this, with some masked off parts will be a JA grey. I also scribed in some additional lines in the leg armour - to better the separation on the masked parts and to serve as additional detail. Further colours are yet to be decided but I am leaning towards a beige, along with some stripy motif of some kind.

Took me forever it seems just to prime the gray parts. Once it was all primed (after several airbrush clogs and cleans) I had already lost half the day, and doing the masking and first undercoat of royal blue took up the rest. Lessons learned here - if your brush is consistently clogging, your not thinning it enough. Although I trusted the primer to be adequately thinned for my needs, it was a false presumption. I knew I bought a bottle of thinner from plamo UK for a reason.. Next time it will run smoother I hope.

Once the royal blue was completed, it left a bobbly, dirty residue, in which after some deliberation I decided to stick with as a "texture detail", some of course would grin with a sceptical comment about laziness, they would probably in all fairness be half right :)

Anyway, a video of the preceding described WIP below. Turned out quite nice in the end, and with the discovery of the additional Gatling cannon hidden in my spare parts bin, this Ryurai-Kai I have decided to title:

"Model 38 Ryurai-Kai: Suppression vanguard"

Now I need to hunt for some suitable decals :)

Thanks for watching and reading, more soon!

Frame Arms: Ryurai Kai first impressions

Throughout the week I have been doing the usual cutting/sanding, getting the most laborious task out of the way in preparation for assembly this weekend. 

Now it is complete, I can summarise it as a pretty enjoyable build, with a few flaws and some cool extras. Lets start with the problems. The frame itself. Its loose and flimsy. It may be just my copy, but I had to unfortunately glue it in some places otherwise the legs would be coming off by a gentle breeze. Some parts were a little tough to fit, while other parts snapped on a little weirdly and sat at odd angles (the plates of additional armour on the front of the legs a prime example). 

Model 38 Type 1 Ryurai Kai Frame Arms

Now for the good stuff. It looks amazing. To my surprise it came with some alternative armour parts I was not expecting. This way, you can wither make it the mean-looking, heavily armoured artillery type or the more streamlined, infantry type. The benefit to this of course is that I can paint all the parts, and effectively get two models out of it! 

Will I get another one? Well, maybe. On looks alone it's totally up my street. On build, I enjoinder it but when parts started to drop off with no effort at all I could not help feeling disappointed  In balance though, it gets a thumbs up for sure. Coming up next time, let' see how well it paints :) 

Here's a vid of the assembly:

 

1/100 MG Zeta 2.0

Done! at last.. phew. My entry for the Gundam Eclipse summer war compo.

Zeta is done, plus some other things.

Hello! Yes, I finally completed the Zeta 2.0! Well, not entirely. Truthfully, I did not get around to doing everything I wanted to, and that was to paint the base up nice and add a little plastic man guiding the Zeta out from the footplate. As time would have it, I did not get it done. I shall make another post soon with some pics to peruse.

This means, luckily, I have met the deadline for the gundam eclipse summer war competition. Fingers crossed.. I entered the OOB intermediate category but I don'y hold out much for success, the other entries are marvellous.

Anyway, here is an update from the you tube, with a little look at my Gundam display cabinet:

Next up: Frame arms Ryu Rai Kai!

1/144 HG Age-1 Spallow: Halloween "jack 'o lantern" custom

Thanks hummingbird for the alternative name suggestion :) Yep, its done, its not perfect but its done. It was kind of an experiment in colour really as there (although it does not look like it) are 4 different shades of green on this one. The orange was just to make it "pop" and it kind of inadvertently turned into a hallowe'en thing when my wife commented on its colour combination.

Anyway, enough waffle, here's some ruddy pictures for you to look at for your own allotted time of viewing. I hope you find them acceptable to your brains.

Age-1 Spallow WIP

Treating this as a bit of an experiment, as well as some much-needed practice when it comes to airbrushing, and slight modification. I added just 2 extra panel lines to this kit, along the shoulders, and also added a koto round bit to the rear of the shoulders. Looks a little "stuck on", perhaps I should have sunk it a little by drilling a hole.. still, what's done is done. 

Have completed all the base coating, looking mighty colourful. "Inner frame" is the usual gunmetal, the blue pats are now all the awesome looking Tamiya park green, white is now orange, a few yellow bits and a little bit of light green.

I will be masking off some of the park green parts, and adding some Khaki in. Shall also be masking off some of the gunmetal parts, and adding in silver. Its going to look like a psychedelic hippy death ninja by the time its done. In fact.. that'll be its custom name I think.

Age-1 Spallow: Psychedelic death ninja custom.

Yeah. Like that.

Frame parts, in the usual gunmetal. 

The blue parts, now park green.

Look at the colours, taste the toxic rainbow.

Zeta MG WIP Part 5

A little progress, painted up the weapons now and have added a little detail into them. I must admit to being a little disappointed with this build.. I just wish I did not rush it as much as I have. However, I must persevere and continue onwards. Once these parts are complete, I'll be painting and weathering the base. I will then be assembling the parts was chunks (arms, legs,  backpack, torso, head, weapons, shield  and giving them all a top coat, then 2-3 layers of gloss before doing (and in some cases re-doing) the panel lining. Then its onto the decals.

Heres a pic of what I have done today:

A few tiny hand-painted details if you can see.. :)

On another note, Have today done a little update on you tube, just to show my new work area set-up really, and my new portable spray booth which is awesome :)

Later!

Gunpla Update, in video form

Yep, I have finally shown my face on camera and am talking, despite being in the throws of one of the most shittiest colds I have experienced for a while.. listen to me jabber on about gunpla here:

More soon.

Zeta MG WIP Part 4

A little bit of progression in regards tot he Zeta MG 2.0: Painted the backpack now black / red / white / gunmetal. Not really gone into too much detail wise just undercoating really. Base coated the black parts with a navy blue, although the finish I am not entirely happy with as you can see below.. I am hoping the gloss overcoat will disguise the awful sputtering caused by what I can only assume is the compressor. I have 2 moisture filters fitted now, and an entirely new (and quality I might add) airbrush - so the only thing left that can cause a spattering issue is the compressor.. I shall have to save a little to afford a new one!

Anyway, here are some pix:

Ready for re-assembly in around 24 hours time. 

Dodgy finish.. 

Completion soon I hope, gotta meet the deadline :)

The September 8th Update

Time for an update! yes. With the completion of the Palace Athene (that I was very proud of) I am feeling a little more motivated and have decided that my next build will be my favourite ever Gundam, the F91. Its been sitting on my shelf for some time now as I kept putting it off until  felt I had the necessary skill to make it look as good as I want it to. I am certainly more confident now in what I do, but I will however be taking my time as the last thing I want to do is mess it up. I will not be adding any extra detail or panel lining as yet - I'll probably save that for the 1/144 Geara Zulu. I bought a whole stack of detailing parts from Kotobukiya so I will be making use of these to make the Geara Zulu look even meaner. I am also thinking of either a shiny metallic fire burst paint scheme.. more on this later. WIP vids will be up soon. Oh, and before I forget, I must mention my new airbrush. I got a lovely mid-range Iwata neo and gosh what a difference it has made to my airbrushing.. 100% recommend this if your like me, looking to take that next step up in airbrushing. Love it.

Iwata Neo

Kotobukiya detailing stuff

My new toolbox! I outgrew the last one..

Some other news, my good buddy gunplabuilders has been busy on the youtube of late telling us about the exciting GNN news he intends to do in the future. I think this idea is great as I have certainly found there is no "community" type news item channel on youtube for gunpla at all to my knowledge. There are lots of great modellers and people out there actively contributing to the community and supporting its growth who would happily contribute. Fingers crossed this idea takes off, its got my support for sure :)

I have also launched recently a facebook page, here I will be posting picture of my completed work and generally commenting on what I am doing. I would really appreciate it if you can give me a like, if I can get at least 50 I will be chuffed, I think I am at 8 now which is a good start :)

I have been using the fantastic IFTTT to link all of my social media to make things more easily update-able and interconnected. I am also in the process of migrating the content of this blog to a fully-fledged website. It's been in planning for ages but I have never had the time to actually do it. For those of you who don't know I am a web designer by trade although you would not think it looking at my blog :) The idea is it will be more or less the same content as it is now, but I may add a gunpla shop depending on how well I can negotiate with a supplier.

Anyways, thank you for reading and that. More soon, and your support much appreciated :)

Palace Athene HG WIP 3

Completed! Yay! And I must say I really enjoyed this build, it is one of my very favourite MS designs for its pure assaultyness, and I think the colour choices turned out fabulous. A little ropey in some places when it came to the panel lining, but overall I am happy with the result. Here is the final WIP video from youtube:

A few pictures of the completed, now titled "Palace Athene Anaheim Refit" (on account of the anaheim shiny logos all over it).