Gunpla Building Community

My first gunpla, Astray Red Frame Kai

What do you mean, Mrs. Loheng-Rinko totally counts as a Seed kit! I'll fight anyone who disagrees in Gunpla Battle.

Anyway, the Strike is from the BB Senshi Striker Weapon System kit, but I wouldn't have been able to fit it onto her lap if any of the weapon packs had been equipped. Sad. Once I get the Skygrasper painted, because holy crap it needs it, I'll stick all the weapons on it instead and add it to the stand.

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In case anyone hasn't seen this announcement yet:

THE GUNDAM BASE MOBILE USA TOUR. What to expect! Enjoy & look forward to exclusive items, free workshop kits, playtest video games and more!

So far i haver a 1/100 Full Mechanics barbatos, 2 small sds i got for cheap, 3 Digimon Amplified and a Yugioh Amplified. Im looking at what to build next and im thinking on sticking to 1/100. Whats your opinion on that?

Also, have you guys done any house moving with gunplas? im positive i will be moving in less than 2 years or so and im more worried about having to move the gunplas than the figures as they are more flimsy

If anyone had any tips/tricks for any of these models, idy love to hear them! I want to do these right by their awesomeness and make them look good!

Whoof, that name's a mouthful. But anyway. This kit. I love it. The fact that it came with this entire display area, complete with tapestries in the back, is just so ridiculously amazing. Like, sure, this is based on the MG 1.5 RX-78, so the hands don't necessarily hold the weapons that well, but who cares? Just put them in the weapon racks and the Gundam itself in seiza.

These were some of the first models I painted. I really like how the glossy black accentuates the clear parts on Aerial.

I got the FA-78 Thunderbolt ver.ka a while back and loved the kit, so decided to get the HG version as a paint project. I'm pleased with how the color scheme turned out.

Headon view:

Something I've been working on off and on for a few years. Ostensibly a 2xTallgeese conversion kit (one for each), although it really doesn't use very much from the Tallgeese at all, just mostly the limb joints. I found out later that this is because the kit was a rework of an earlier resin Kit that didn't use any Tallgeese parts at all to begin with.

I painted all but the white and green.

I lost track of these because about a billion of them came out in Japan and my FLHS stopped getting them in years ago. But I like the concept.

Also, this is the superior G-3 color scheme. Dunno why every release has different colors.

This thing was a simple kit made into a beast with the way I went about layering blacks to get one that was slightly lighter than black-black and kept some of the metallic of the base coat. I'd have done another but it wouldn't go with what I have planned for it without the different head types for the V. Oh well, 2/3 done! This is my take on the Victory coloring for the Rear Shrike Corps from Crossbone Ghost.

My very first MG kit, originally built almost 20 years ago, newly repainted and equipped with the Seraphim binders and Neue Zwergs from the Effect Wings Snow White addon kit. Had to strip off all the original decals for the painting, but honestly the stickers hadn't handled 20 years worth of dust very well anyway. Also, the original hands were terrible at actually holding the buster rifles, so I put in some magnets to stick them to the forearms

Or, according to the manual "EAST INVINCIBLE", which is some jarring Engrish given how well translated the rest of it was. Now I just need Bandai to release a HGFC Rising Gundam so I can pose them together for the Sekiha Love Love Tenkyoken.

Bonus: Nobell Gundam on a horse

HG Zaku II C5 (bc I can't find a C6) for Font Baud in the Crossbone Ghost scene I'm now putting together.

I didn't like the greens used in the kit, so I grabbed some cans of Valejo Goblin Green and Russian Green. The grey's/blacks/browns were painted with Testor's Graphite Grey Metallic. The backpack was painted with Testor's Diamond Dust and given a couple of quick sprays of Ironlak Black Techie, for texture. Bc this is the only suit of the 3 that's "old," I used an acrylic Satin topcoat to give it a fuller look compared to the X0 and V that will accompany it.

Since the Zaku is the only non-combatant in the 4-way fight of Crossbone Ghost, I grabbed a box of Build Hands Round. I was a little surprised when I got them, as all the small, medium, and large options were noticeably different in size from the hands included with the Zaku kit. In the end, I went with the medium, as they were closest (smaller, but still closest.)

Link to some more photos (bc I can't seem to be able to get any Lemmy client to let me upload photos into a posts body): https://imgur.com/a/yieFt17

Messer Zwergs are from the Effect Wings Snow White addon kit. The paint mixture I used ended up being more blue than I expected, but all in all it still turned out pretty well.

Bonus: there's something not right about this Snow White, but I can't quite put my finger on it...

More photos: https://imgur.com/a/qggitCt

What doozy this one is! The build was great! Took me forever but that was on me.

In my now-fashion, I gave it a coat of paint, this time in more places than I usually do. Every piece of the internal frame got painted this time around. I did not paint the yellows bc it's an iconic color to me and I haven't found the right metallic yellow (I don't want gold) yet. I also used a few glitter coats of differing glitter fineness. The finest one was used on the yellows as a light coat to give it some shimmer. I actually really wanted this puppy to shimmer. I used the medium fine to spray on the psycho frame pieces, as well as on the funnel stand segments closest to the flying fins, and the coarser glitter spray on the segments closest to the stand. I was hoping to kind of recreate the summer trail left behind psycho controlled funnels. I also got some of the newer style LED pucks for MG so I decided this guy should have one!

Some things I noticed when building this big boi:

Articulation is awesome!

The few color changing stickers were a very welcome change to the foil stickers of HGs. They were super sticky and pliable. It found it to be no problem using a lil extra thumb force to get a lil stretch on then in areas they didn't quite reach far enough. I also didn't realize they were even part of the kit until opening it, so I ended up painting the light grey ones to match the light silver I used.

These suckers are not built to hold 6 funnels on one shoulder without great care. If 6 fins are on the backpack and it's placed on the stand, it leans lol it's not a snug fit to the back/backpack from the stand.

I did get the P-Bandai double funnel set to go with this (I know I didn't config the Nu for double fins on the backpack, but I like that cool sabre 😎) and the dang fins just don't want to stay shut enough to keep the lil effects in place (as seen in the gallery)

The double fin set also came with 🥁🥁🥁 an exact duplicate of the stand included with the Ver.Ka 🤦‍♂️ SoI guess I have a spare now 🤷‍♂️

Overall a great build! Now it's time to move on to the HG "scene" from Crossbone Ghost I've been planning!

Or as my wife likes to refer to it, the iPhone Zaku. I didn't seem to run into the same build issues that I did when I built the OG RG Zaku II, which had me belly crawling on the floor to find spring-flung beads and supergluing the leg spring mounts.

However, the pauldron sticker with the blue stripes was abysmal trying to get it to match the opposing and ever changing radius curves. The sticker was never going to lay flat. Luckily, there was an unused logo that matched the one on the stripe sticker, and I had a bottle of acrylic paint that was bought to paint rocks, and had also been recently used on some Warhammer minis that matched the color pretty spot-on. I ended up freehanding the stripes. It isn't perfect, but it definitely looks better than the sticker did.

Rear view:

I already posted a pic of this in a mostly completed state alongside the Kiryu, but this can now be considered actually done. Mostly just a straight pallet swap (blue > white, red > blue, yellow to red), not including the stripes and shoulder armor. The stylized RX-78 emblem and the star field are actually custom decals I printed onto blank water slide paper, and I'm really pleased with how they turned out. Not pictured is the core fighter, which has also been pallet swapped. At some point I'll do a resin cast of the MG 3.0 core block and sitting pilot figure and replace the core fighter with them so that I can have the core fighter out on display too. Aside from that, probably the only other thing I might do is tint the beam javelin effect parts pink.

Aoshima's Type 3 Kiryu Kai Eva-02 color version, with a partially finished MG 2.0 Gundam (repainted in the American Type colors) for comparison. Since the Kiryu normally just has uniformly silver armor all over, to get the Evangelion style coloring a lot of pieces were pre-painted on the runners. Which is nice in that it saves me the trouble of painting it myself (or gods forbid, applying giant stickers to recolor pieces), but unfortunately it does leave nub marks. Build complexity isn't quite at MG standard, but there is enough of an inner skeleton that I would still rate it as more than HG. Price is a little steep, being more in the high end action figure range than what would be expected for a comparable Gunpla, but all in all I'm pretty satisfied with the kit.