Gundam 00 Raiser & The Right Sort of Green

No, I have not been painting my Gundam green. I'll come to that in a moment. What I've been doing with the Gundam, following undercoating, is getting my base colours on. For all the "dark grey" sprues I've now spray painted Boltgun Metal and given a wash of Baddab black, to create a bit of contrast. I'm of the view that the grey parts of the Gundam are supposed to be metal in appearance, but to keep the price of the kits down they don't do metallic colour plastic.

Aside from being able to give the Gundam a more appropriate colour scheme (in my view), the paint also takes away the shiny plastic look of the model. TBH - this is the main virtue of painting a Gundam for me and you don't really need to do much more than that. My friend Wayne painted up an Endless Waltz Gundam Zero Wing and did nothing more than just apply his own colour scheme. No highlighting or blending or anything clever like that (which Wayne is more than "more than" capable of), apart from a bit of shading in the recesses. The finished model looks stunning. A hugely effective yet simple colour scheme.

I intend to do more in the way of shading and highlighting on my Gundam and hopefully I won't come unstuck in the process. I've not yet decided how I will do the highlighting yet, because at present it is a bit hard to orient pieces on the sprue or even work out which part is likely to catch the most light. I will probably assemble parts and then paint them once I have a better idea of the 3D structure.

But as for the green......

We had another edition of "Paint Club" on Sunday and I picked up the Azrael figure I'd be working on previously and decided that I couldn't continue without tackling the "green issue" which had so hacked me off while painting the Dark Angels devastators. However, rather than compromise the work I'd already done with an "experiment" I brought a spare figure with me and worked on him first to see how the green went.

I'm much happier with these results. I used Orkhide shade for the green, which blends much better with the black and has less of a yellow tinge than DA Green. This gives me the shade and contrast I want, without having to create an overly light highlight. Knarloc green works well for the edge highlighting. I just need to decide how much blending and highlighting work I want to do.

And here's the Azrael in progress. I repainted all the green from the original colour scheme, working from a black base, followed by a 50/50 Orkhide Shade and Black mix, then Orkhide shade and then a simple edge highlight of Knarloc Green. I felt a lot more positive about the experience, so I carried on with building up the highlight on the robe. 

I'll come back to these once the Gundam is complete.