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Model Making Makes Me Merry
- Thread starter WisteriaHysteria
- Start date
There's been persistent rumors, popping up in relatively reputable places, that Lego will put out an official 2ft long Enterprise-D Lego set in November... With detachable saucer section, minifigs, and everything...
I dunno if my wallet can take the punch that'll cost but oh man...
I dunno if my wallet can take the punch that'll cost but oh man...
I was thinking the same thing! The blue ripple laser's a real giveaway.
Oh my god, as if the Mario and Zelda and LotR and NASA themes weren't enough. Now I *really* gotta get a new job, lol.
Tomm Guycot
(he/him)
So I had a concept forming when I picked up the RfV RX78(G)e, and my wife has a full photo situation set up for her nail art. I wanted to have some fun with photo compositing so I locked my camera into position and took similar shots in different lighting conditions.
This let me capture the feeling i wanted, and the details of the kits would still show properly in my implied lighting. This is maybe a pretty obvious concept for anyone who has seen the UC Gundam stuff but I enjoyed working on it.
I also made several alternate versions. I suppose this is what playing with toys looks like in adulthood.
This let me capture the feeling i wanted, and the details of the kits would still show properly in my implied lighting. This is maybe a pretty obvious concept for anyone who has seen the UC Gundam stuff but I enjoyed working on it.
I also made several alternate versions. I suppose this is what playing with toys looks like in adulthood.
Meanwhile, over the course of a month interrupted by travel and other things, I finally sat down and put together this MG Rick Dom, who is a big chonky boy all about his very large guns.
This thing has a ton of interior detail that's barely visible in the final product, all the way down to a dude in the cockpit.
The kit came with a metric butt-ton of water decals which I haven't applied yet (and am honestly a little intimidated by). COuld also benefit from some weathering but I don't really trust my skills there yet. I did a bit of panel-lining and touch-ups here and there, but there's not a ton to do of that sort of thing on this guy given all the wide expanses of smooth purple armor. Oh, and it has the cool fully-posable single-piece hands which are scary to cut off the runners but very nice once you have them deployed.
All in all, a very fun kit for diving back in after years away. Many thanks to @Lyrai who generously gifted me this kit way back in Festivus '23!
... maybe eventually I'll get to some of the rest of my backlog.
This thing has a ton of interior detail that's barely visible in the final product, all the way down to a dude in the cockpit.
The kit came with a metric butt-ton of water decals which I haven't applied yet (and am honestly a little intimidated by). COuld also benefit from some weathering but I don't really trust my skills there yet. I did a bit of panel-lining and touch-ups here and there, but there's not a ton to do of that sort of thing on this guy given all the wide expanses of smooth purple armor. Oh, and it has the cool fully-posable single-piece hands which are scary to cut off the runners but very nice once you have them deployed.
All in all, a very fun kit for diving back in after years away. Many thanks to @Lyrai who generously gifted me this kit way back in Festivus '23!
... maybe eventually I'll get to some of the rest of my backlog.
Tomm Guycot
(he/him)
Very cool!!
I think my next kit will be my very first mono-eye so this is inspiring.
I think my next kit will be my very first mono-eye so this is inspiring.
Hey, it's one of my favorite mecha!
I didn’t include that particular mid-assembly detail pic, but the mono-eye is set up on a stalk in a cross-shaped track so you can pose it anywhere (though you have to disassemble the helmet to do so). I imagine most applicable MG kits do that, but I dunno about smaller ones.
This is something that was more common in older Master Grades, and something that more modern kits lack. And it's kind of a shame, even though I understand why.
Tomm Guycot
(he/him)
Current McDonalds toys are a godsend. Captured a quick shot of Amuro defending the Archgamac.
Looks a bit like he’s trying to kick a field goal with the truck.
Amuro was a BK man first and foremost
Amuro was a BK man first and foremost
Tomm Guycot
(he/him)
We're a mere gloss coat away from weathering...
Tomm Guycot
(he/him)
I ran out of top coat before I got to the Bits, so I'm not finished. But the Red Gundam himself is done. Here are some teasers including a Belmont pose.
There were a lot of little fixes I had to make for this guy which I'll detail in the official post.
There were a lot of little fixes I had to make for this guy which I'll detail in the official post.
Tomm Guycot
(he/him)
So the GQuX Red Gundam was a big one for me. As you may remember, ep2 is what Gundam-pilled me to begin with and led me down this path. I immediately searched to see if there was a Red Gundam model, and ordered it immediately. There were some ups and downs and I canceled and reordered it from different stores a few times, but it finally arrived in time to be my third serious kit, fifth kit overall.
This ended up to be kind of fortuitous overall. Mysteriously, I made a ton of beginner mistakes on it, as if it WAS my first kit. D'oh. However, this kit is also kind of lackluster for a variety of reasons, and if it WAS my first kit I would have played it safe and just had a Red Gundam that didn't hold up the legacy of Alternate UC Char. Instead, I was a bit emboldened to use tricks I'd picked up and push into new territory, trying out some acrylic markers my wife had lying around for her nail art.
The markers weren't ideal for such small work and several cycles of touch up / clean up sullied the results a bit. If you zoom in it looks a bit sloppy! but from a distance it's far more dynamic than the base kit!
Deciding to fill in the small details where this kit had no color separation seemed like a simple task - but it ballooned as more and more details became apparent. The big ones were his hand/wrist piping, black saber handles, almost everything about the bits, the light gray viewport on the shield, back of shield, and the vents of the Hammer. Please note the weathering I applied around the jets of the Hammer to add some carbon burns. Really happy with how that turned out.
My biggest mod here was the body color. The model as a base is mostly made of bland salmon-colored plastic. I think it gives the kit a cheap feeling overall. I get the concept, reusing the plastic from Char's zaku, but I just didn't like the feeling. So I did an overall wash with red realtouch, and I think the results are great both in staining it a deeper red (just look at the kit's boxart) and also giving it depth overall.
Please ignore the stickers on his shoulders. They have 2 layers of gloss coat after I meticulously placed them 10 times. They just have minds of their own. I will distract you with Super Castlevania 4 references, both SFami and SNES versions!
Anyway now that I've finally tackled Red Gundam and done modeling for nearly 6 months, I think the greatest aspect is the variety of kits. You'd never end up making the same model mobile suit over and over.
This ended up to be kind of fortuitous overall. Mysteriously, I made a ton of beginner mistakes on it, as if it WAS my first kit. D'oh. However, this kit is also kind of lackluster for a variety of reasons, and if it WAS my first kit I would have played it safe and just had a Red Gundam that didn't hold up the legacy of Alternate UC Char. Instead, I was a bit emboldened to use tricks I'd picked up and push into new territory, trying out some acrylic markers my wife had lying around for her nail art.
The markers weren't ideal for such small work and several cycles of touch up / clean up sullied the results a bit. If you zoom in it looks a bit sloppy! but from a distance it's far more dynamic than the base kit!
Deciding to fill in the small details where this kit had no color separation seemed like a simple task - but it ballooned as more and more details became apparent. The big ones were his hand/wrist piping, black saber handles, almost everything about the bits, the light gray viewport on the shield, back of shield, and the vents of the Hammer. Please note the weathering I applied around the jets of the Hammer to add some carbon burns. Really happy with how that turned out.
My biggest mod here was the body color. The model as a base is mostly made of bland salmon-colored plastic. I think it gives the kit a cheap feeling overall. I get the concept, reusing the plastic from Char's zaku, but I just didn't like the feeling. So I did an overall wash with red realtouch, and I think the results are great both in staining it a deeper red (just look at the kit's boxart) and also giving it depth overall.
Please ignore the stickers on his shoulders. They have 2 layers of gloss coat after I meticulously placed them 10 times. They just have minds of their own. I will distract you with Super Castlevania 4 references, both SFami and SNES versions!
Anyway now that I've finally tackled Red Gundam and done modeling for nearly 6 months, I think the greatest aspect is the variety of kits. You'd never end up making the same model mobile suit over and over.
Tomm Guycot
(he/him)
How it started
How it's going
How it's going
Tomm Guycot
(he/him)
So as shown in the post above I already had a growing box of boxes. I'm terrible with getting rid of packaging especially when it has cool art. Fortunately, a Gunpla Youtuber shared a method created by an instagrammer to make boxes a more economical part of your collection.
So with the right tools
and a little creativity
You can turn your boxes into trading cards for display in an album. Since I'm only starting Gunpla this gives me the opportunity to catalog my entire collection of builds. I plan to add some numbers in the upper right corners to indicate the order of my builds, and then once I have a consistent filming setup I can take images to display on the back of each card to showcase my builds.
So with the right tools
and a little creativity
You can turn your boxes into trading cards for display in an album. Since I'm only starting Gunpla this gives me the opportunity to catalog my entire collection of builds. I plan to add some numbers in the upper right corners to indicate the order of my builds, and then once I have a consistent filming setup I can take images to display on the back of each card to showcase my builds.
Violentvixen
(She/Her)
Oh that's a very cool idea!
Oh that is a good idea
Tomm Guycot
(he/him)
Tiny update - finally found good silver decals to number the kits in order.
I ordered my second Gunpla kit today (the Berserker variant of the Nobel Gundam), and I reflected over how strange it is that the high quality, extremely poseable Gundam model kits are a lot less expensive to buy from eBay than the lower-quality, limbs-coming-loose Gundam toys.
Tomm Guycot
(he/him)
I've been slowly plugging away at Solari's Zaku II F Type from Requiem for Vengeance. The Gundam EX kit was so detailed and cool I had high hopes for the Zaku (my first Zaku) and it didn't disappoint.
The stickers are a bit weird in that they included weathering detail. Which meant I needed to weather the kit enough to hide how weird that looked. Other customizations include the black lines on the skirt armor (the sectional stickers both Requiem kits use are normally great, but over gray plastic they end up looking FAKE AS HELL and ruined the visual entirely). Then I obviously detailed the heat hawk - I made one side molten and the other side inert to show properly as needed.
Then, right as I was posing it for the 8-shot photoshoot I had planned, its arm joint snapped. So... not sure what to do about that. Tried to get the ultimate shot (oops you can see the arm joint : /) but it is what it is. Looking into the best way to fix this outside of buying the kit again for spare parts.
The stickers are a bit weird in that they included weathering detail. Which meant I needed to weather the kit enough to hide how weird that looked. Other customizations include the black lines on the skirt armor (the sectional stickers both Requiem kits use are normally great, but over gray plastic they end up looking FAKE AS HELL and ruined the visual entirely). Then I obviously detailed the heat hawk - I made one side molten and the other side inert to show properly as needed.
Then, right as I was posing it for the 8-shot photoshoot I had planned, its arm joint snapped. So... not sure what to do about that. Tried to get the ultimate shot (oops you can see the arm joint : /) but it is what it is. Looking into the best way to fix this outside of buying the kit again for spare parts.
Tomm Guycot
(he/him)
So after all that work on Solari's Zaku ended with a mishap I decided to do a much faster job on the next kit, not doing weathering and only doing panel lining, etc. That worked out... sort of correct in the end.
First, since I did the heat hawk on Solari I started the same for Police Zaku, but with a more GQuX color scheme. This process has so many steps I actually started this before the rest of the kit. Coloring the inside of its thrusters red was also simple enough, so I took care of that too. But that was intended to be it!
However while sanding down marks on the pieces, somehow his wrist piece snapped in half. So then I had to glue that. While applying stickers, one of the white lines on his leg runners ripped (and they provided 2 extras!!) so I had to paint one of those white lines myself. But that was it! No other obstacles!
Until 5 days of rain in CA prevented me from top coating and finishing off the kit. So my quick turnaround was about the same length of time as my other builds. But it's pretty cool I think. I love the GQuX Zaku designs. And since Solari didn't get her big combat scene, I shot one for this guy instead.
First, since I did the heat hawk on Solari I started the same for Police Zaku, but with a more GQuX color scheme. This process has so many steps I actually started this before the rest of the kit. Coloring the inside of its thrusters red was also simple enough, so I took care of that too. But that was intended to be it!
However while sanding down marks on the pieces, somehow his wrist piece snapped in half. So then I had to glue that. While applying stickers, one of the white lines on his leg runners ripped (and they provided 2 extras!!) so I had to paint one of those white lines myself. But that was it! No other obstacles!
Until 5 days of rain in CA prevented me from top coating and finishing off the kit. So my quick turnaround was about the same length of time as my other builds. But it's pretty cool I think. I love the GQuX Zaku designs. And since Solari didn't get her big combat scene, I shot one for this guy instead.