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.

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.

Happy Halloween – 1/8 Horizon Alien

Never got the will to finish this kit – on of the first I’ve bought. But this year I thought I could make something for Halloween, so I dug up this  oldie and tried to finish it quick. However after finding many references, I still don’t know what to do with the guy. My memory of it is mostly brown, the movie is black, Giger’s are somewhat metallic, and I had it in metallic colors in the beginning. Not nice. Then at the end I decided to go with a more biological version of it with airbrushed veins (ballpen could work but it didn’t look natural). Also used clear resin to top its head for maximum shininess. After all it seems everyone has different interpretation of the beast, and here is mine. More images on my Smugmug gallery

Hasegawa 1/48 YF-19 (Macross Plus)

Spent about 3 weekends on this guy. Finally building a macross plane with landing gear, hehe, since this guys to a bit too large to support in free flight form. The legs/engine hatch can be opened and I built one side open and one side closed; it’s possible to close them after the fact, but you don’t really want to do it…
This time I tried to slam the wide angle lens really close to get some dramatic perspectives.
Now I’m really waiting for that 1/48 Strike Valkyie… pulllleeese Hasegawa, stop teasing us!!!

More images on smugmug.

Gyan Gyan Gyan~

Time for another robot… the one-time wonder Gyan that I really liked when I was a kid.

Keiko girls done!

Very different from what I imagined the set to be initially, but I’m not complaining

More images from my smugmug gallery.

Photographing this kit was a real challenge. The girls are facing different ways, so their faces could easily be in the shadows, especially Holiday (middle). After picking up some studio setup tips, I built a reflector board using crumbled aluminum foil, and it worked really great.

Another challenge is the depth of the kit. The kit is about 8″ in diameter, so it’s quite deep for a macro-like shot. Had to crank all the way up to f/22, which requires bright flash to compensate. I also couldn’t expose more than 1 second or else the modeling light (yellow tint) will show in the photos. Somehow everything worked out just ok at ISO 200.