This is the 4th Bandai VF-31 I’m building. Should’ve put up the previous 3 🙂 I did one Hayate with Fast Pack in Gerwalk form, one Messer (I like his Grim Reaper), one Deculture and this one I got because it was on sale, when Banzai Hobby was selling a VF-31+fast pack+SV-262+Lil Draken for more than 50% off. It’s not the first time I buy kits because they’re cheap and probably wouldn’t be the last 🙂 The Deculture kit left me with the Flying knight decal that I can make the final episode version, and left over reactor bombs from my previous VF-25S Armored Ozma gives me the armaments. I needed to attach them to the Siegfried’s shields 
I used up the body decals in the Deculture kit (shouldn’t have done that),
and the Hayate’s final aircraft has a different paint scheme than his original, which spots the blue-black-red-purple-white scheme mixing in Messer’s with his own.
So for this version I chose to mask and paint the stripes. I thought I was smart to use the vinyl seals for masking, it works actually quite well, but the vinyl was adhering very well to the surface and stretches, which makes their removal quite tedious. I’d still paint the strips rather than use the body decal though in retrospect, as the bandai decals is very brittle after application and they don’t bend well, tends to crumple after you coat them. I had this one done last week.
