More black light fun

Batch 2 as promised. I thought hard about how to make the Unicorn’s psycho frame glow and got it some fluorescent color at first, but this is totally unnecessary with black light. Had to strip it off before taking this set.

TAP

Filling the backlog

I’m starting to shoot the models I’ve done over the past few years… there’s just a lot so I won’t be making separate pages for them, but rather shooting a batch whenever I feel like it. Here is the first Master Grade batch. 

TAP

This isn’t mentioned in any significant way but some of the Bandai kits have some sort of fluorescent coating that reacts well to black light. I’m very happy how the Nu Gundam’s psycho frame and Wild Tiger turned out. Unicorn would look really nice with this too, and may be this will get me to start working on its FA version.

What took them so long?

Hasegawa finally came out with the 1/48 version of the Strike Valkyrie. OMG. I have no doubt they were going to do it eventually, but man that’s a frigging 3 years since the regular version came out!

That’s why they’ve become one of the also-ran companies.

My dremel lasted 12 years

My dremel minimite has finally died due to a motor jam. But given it has served me for 12 years that was great investment. The new minimite is smaller and lighter, which is awesome.

Patraqushie Mirage redux

Playing with flash and trying to retake some of my older kits. The good’ol Knight of Gold AT / Patraqushie Mirage is definitely still one of my fav, so I decided to see how it goes casting a blue gel… interesting!

Steam Detectives Ling-ling and Ran-ran 1/8

Another kit that took more than 10 years in the making… haha. Steam Detectives wasn’t a popular manga, but out of the illustrations came the two pro/antagonist assitant nurses in lingerie, yay.

I love the original kits because they’re so unique, but I’ve always felt they don’t look good as individual kits, nor do they have that “wow” factor. Eventually I decided to put them together, but they weren’t meant to be, therefore a lot of planning and trial and error was necessary. This went on and off for years… Lately I’ve decided to try netted stockings on them. The effect have been done on a lot of kits, but they all have the same flaw: we’re basically wrapping a piece of cloth/netting around the leg, and there has to be a junction where the two ends meet, which are often ugly seams. Since the steam detective girls are lying down, the seams can be hidden very well, so I went ahead.

The base is one of the biggest I’ve done, with a 14×8 sq. in. elliptical, with underlying cotton balls to “immerse” the girl’s uniforms into the royal purple groundwork. I’m not totally happy about the choice of the reflective purple since it competes with the other elements of the kits, but that’s the most fitting given the choices I had.

TAP

Gundam Epyon EW 1/100 Master Grade EW MG

It seems like everyone and their cat are building this Epyon kit. It might not be the most popular suit coming from Gundam Wing, but the Katoki’s MG rendition was pretty awesome, maintaining its sinister look while modernizing the design so that it’s less super-robot-like. The only thing I don’t like are the wings, which seemed too low in the original kit. I like my robots to have some crap surrounding its head visually somehow, like stuff popping up from the back or something. So I inverted the support beam of the backpack so the wings are elevated; IMHO the height was just right. Did some extensive drybrushing on the edges since the body was dark.

Ryofu ver. wet

Haven’t done any girly kit for ages, and after the last update 4 years ago, I couldn’t find Ryofu’s hair pieces and thus she just sit in limbo. Over the weekend I found the pieces so I’ve  finish up the final touch ups. Click on the images to enlarge.

Gundam Deathscythe Hell Custom : Endless Waltz EW MG

This critter came from a nonstop weekend run of kit building to make room for another big purchase…

Would need more photos soon but I’m a bit sick of posing this dude…

While I like the mech and the kit has done justice to it, I feel the construction of the kit is on the “cheap MG” side of things. The internal frame isn’t detailed (not that I care a whole lot), but the mech is noticeably smaller than other MGs. Heck I have done the Wing Zero Custom and perhaps because of its wings I didn’t feel the kit is that much smaller than other regular MGs. There are also more visible seams here as well… yeah I’m spoiled but I can’t remember the last time I had to work on seams. They’re now also doing a modular switchable 4-finger attachment for different hand expression… I like this better than the stupid 3-finger-plus-1 style of the past, as these hold objects tighter. Wished the Wing Zero was this way. The shoulders are horrible… ABS aren’t perfect and here Bandai decided to use them to leverage the shoulder’s up-and-down motion. Guess what, it doesn’t work that well!

Complaints aside, this dude is pretty cool and I’m looking forward to finish my EW collection (VERY BEGRUDGINGLY), as they’re all some of the best Katoki renditions.

OO Raiser Gundam Seven Swords

OO Gundam is a rather strange design with top heavy components, and the Seven Swords configuration fixes some of that issue with more legs attachments. The Seven Swords mod kit was applied on top of the 1/100 HG kit, and the LED were installed as well. To take photos with nice LED effects, you’ll need to have flash fired on the kit, and then expose for some more seconds so that the weak LED lights can be registered.