Friday 16 September 2011

Aside to other asides

My friend Tim introduced me to the newly released Dynasty Warriors: Gundam 3 before we went to Gen-Con and I really enjoyed it. I've always been kind of agnostic towards the Gundam universe, in a "it exists, but so what?" kind of way. Oh some of the designs are very nice and the model kits can be superb, but I never really felt drawn towards them. This is possibly because the only Gundam I've ever watched was about two episodes of the series "0083" and I found it extremely tedious, despite the presence of giant robots. So I've always filed Gundam away in my mental space as "looks awesome, but meh."

However, playing the game and seeing the wonderfully cel shaded Gundams in action has (sadly) kindled something of an interest. Plus my friend Wayne has had, for a while now, a Gundam Wing Zero: Endless Waltz kit to which he has applied his own rather awesome paint job. I hadn't realised the extent to which these kits could be painted up, as I'd gotten used to seeing them unpainted and just assumed that was how it was done.

Plus, actually seeing the Mobile Suits moving in the game and appreciating not only the dynanism behind them but, also some of the story, made me see more of the possibilities of the kits.

So, awesome model kits + painting = win.

Amirite?

Tim and Wayne, being awesome friends, brought me a Super Deformed Gundam kit back from Japan. Assembled the little fellah looks like this
Only he's not assembled at present, he's be languishing in my big ole stack of "to do" since last year. But, now I've figured I'll give him a go. Assembly wise he should be easy as no glue is required and it is a basic figure, but I reckon I can give him some flare by doing a decent paintjob. I'm going to stick to the colour scheme as you see in the pictures, but all the parts will be painted and the pieces that require stickers will be painted instead.

I'm going to keep it reasonably simple, in part inspired by the crispness of Matt's excellent Tau paintscheme , but also because I think that will work best.

So at some point tomorrow, expect frustrated w.i.p pictures

3 comments:

  1. I've had a similar experience with Gundam. Looks kinda cool but hard for me to care about for some reason. The other thing is that painting a lot of these kits is in a completely different scale than I usually paint and, after an initial foray into both figure models and robot kits, it became apparent that I needed to get an airbrush and some proficiency with it to really make these work out.

    For some reason I seem to have a reluctance to go down the airbrush path and so...

    How tall is the model?

    And I'm gonna say: Awesome model kits + painting = win

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  2. I think the model stands about 5inches tall. I started out brush painting the kit and then realised there was way more plastic than I'd expected. So I switched to airbrush by default, otherwise the kit was going to take me forever.

    My friend Wayne airbrushed his kit and did very basic paintjob. Just flat colours, shading only in the recesses and that was it. It still looks really impressive.

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  3. Thanks!

    Most of the best looking things I've seen of this nature were relatively basic. I think the scale has something to do with that.

    I'll be looking forward to some WiP (frustrated or otherwise) and the finish!

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