Sunday, July 12, 2015

MG 1/100 Hyaku-Shiki Ver. 2.0 (Work in Progress)



The version 2.0 of the MG Hyaku-Shiki was finally released. 
First of all, the kit itself comes in a semi-gloss gold coating (or painting, whichever makes sense). To my very surprise, the quality of the factory gold was very good, and it actually looked much better than those old super gloss gold coatings.
I decided to remove all the existing gold coating and paint it with my favorite metallic gold from Alclad. As much as I appreciate Bandai's new semi-gloss gold, it just does not compare with the quality of the custom painted gold. 
I cut all the gold pieces from the runners, sanded & polished them, and put them under Clorox bleach for 3-4 days. Most of the painting was dissolved gradually except from few small deep areas. I managed to remove remaining layer of coating completely from those areas with T-01m thinner from Gaia color.

Wednesday, July 8, 2015

RE 1/100 GP-04G Gerbera



The popularity of GP04 has always been there, but we were only able to work on this model through a resin or a bootleg kit in the past.
Bandai has finally released it under their own brand name, and I had to put my hands on to see how it really was.
I could tell many detail parts were not separated in pieces, probably in order to keep the manufacturing costs down (unlike 1/100 Master Grades, RE grades are cheaper lines of 1/100 scale).
The overall design and proportion were great even compare to MG, but there were some minor issues that I had to modify.
First, I added 2 mm more to the torso for better proportion. 
Second, I extended the feet unit 3 mm longer and made it sharper. 
I know Bandai has produced the kit based on their original design, but I liked the longer and sharper designs that the old resin kits offered. It just makes the kit look lot more aggressive. 
I erased the factory panel lines on the thigh units and designed my own, and added additional lines on different areas for more details.
Anyhow, here it is. Please enjoy.