Frank's Plamo blog

I wrote this ages ago to be honest and I finally decided to go back to it and post it now. Here it finally is now. My 1/144 HGBF Hi-Mock. I got this kit along with the Mock Army Set and Ez-ARMS at a decent price from a local guy off of a Facebook group for Gunpla and Mecha builders in Canada name Mechanada.

So here’s what I did with this kit.

When assembling it, I knew I was going to paint it so I didn’t fully construct the kit. I assembled what was needed for seamline removal and left the rest with nubs removed and a little bit of drilling on some details. Basically fully prepared for painting. To fill seams I used Tamiya Cement and Tamiya Putty White with a bit of lacquer thinner so I had more working time with it. After I had gotten everything prepped for painting I had to decide what I wanted to do with the kit. I always liked the look of beat down machines so I figured I would make it look like a rusted out junker that looks like it’s been left alone for decades in a warehouse or something. I got to looking up some rust tutorials for scale model car, tank, and gundam models and had finally decided on one by Scale War Machines on youtube.

I pretty much had everything ready to paint but as usual i was just kinda slacking on it and ended up leaving it for a couple days. In those couple of days, I saw ZakuAurelius’s youtube video about his Hi-Mock and how he textured it and decided I wanted to do something similar.

So my breakdown of steps was

Texture the parts

Prime with dark grey

Coat with a rust colour

Clear coat

Paint with the top colour

Clear coat again

Add rust washes

Paint the sensors 

1. TEXTURING

So after referring back to Zaku’s video, I decided to take the putty technique he used and modify it a bit. In his video, he used thinned down Tamiya Putty and applied it to the parts with a sponge. When I added texture to my kit, I used Mr. Surfacer 1000 and applied with with my finger (while wearing gloves of course). I went through with it this way basically cause I didn’t want my parts to have that slightly stucco looking texture but rather more of a chipped and bubbly look like you would see with rust on cars.

When using my finger to apply the texture, I only used a little bit of Mr. Surfacer at a time and just kinda kept going at it sometimes letting it pool VERY slightly in some spots. Once those little pools were somewhat dried, I tried dabbing it again to get it to peel up and off a bit and have a chipped look. Allowing some semi dried Surfacer to build up on my finger also provided some texture. I don’t have any pictures of it before paint over it but you can kinda see what I mean on the chest armor.

During this step I also tried to cover up the seamlines I was a bit lazy with a little bit more or the Surfacer so keep that in mind too if you want to try this out. just make sure it doesn’t look intentional as if you’re trying to “hide your crimes.” Another thing to note is to not put any Surfacer on joints or sections of parts that might be in contact with joints.

2. PRIMING

I used an airbrush to prime all the parts after texturing. I mainly use acrylics cause I don’t have a spray booth yet so I ended up making a dark grey using Vallejo’s Black and Grey Polyurethane Primers thinned with water and their thinner. Light even coats as always should be done. 

3. COAT WITH RUST COLOUR

So i didn’t have any dark orange colours at all which meant I had to mix one myself. I can’t possibly remember the ratios but I do remember the paints I used. All of the paints used for the rust were Citadel paints, specifically Bestial Brown, Red Gore, Blazing Orange, and Sunburst Yellow. I tried to achieve a good middle ground between brown, orange, and red for the base colour of my rust because i would be apply other “detailing layers” with a brush afterwards. After that initial colour was dried, i drybrushed a darker shade that was pretty much just Bestial Brown and then used a sponge to apply a thinned out Blazing Orange and a small amount of Bestial Brown. Didn’t apply it in any specific way, just worked on it until it was good.

4. CLEAR COAT

for clear coating, I used some Vallejo Polyurethane Matte Varnish. I really couldn’t find any info at the time on how to apply it with an airbrush so I just kinda went for it? I ended up making everything too wet and it didn’t really turn out that matte as you can see in the picture above. I guess next time I’m just gonna try doing moderate coats and see what happens. If anyone’s used this lemme know how it works.

5. TOP COLOUR

Ended up wanting to do a colour scheme similar to the Gouf Custom so I just used some Tamiya acrylics for the colours cause I didnt have enough of my citadel paints that I’m trying to use up to cover all the parts. The dark blue used Black X1 and Blue X4, and for the lighter blue I used Blue X4 and White X2. I pretty much followed the steps in that salt chipping video above for each part.

This is where I started having my issues.

When I used this technique to achieve rust, I put WAY too much water on the part to adhere the salt and grinded some grains of the salt itself too small. What ended up happening is that some of the salt started dissolving which lead to white marks and crystals that stuck to the part and weren’t coming off with a toothbrush afterwards without ruining the paint itself. I corrected this later when I did the light blue parts, making sure the parts were only damp enough for the salt to stick but not dissolve and not using the regular sized or almost powdery salt. the light blue would be more forgiving to the white spots but I saw almost none on there.

After the paint was dried, I used some paper towel and some water with a bit of thinner on it and started rubbing a very small amount of the top colour off. I tried to take paint from just the edges and details to show more definition in the few details this kit has. This is where I learned that my clear coat wasn’t really that durable cause a lot of it was just eaten through even when I used just water. Kind of upsetting but I gotta mess with it for sure.

6. CLEAR COAT AGAIN

Tried doing it super light this time. Came out slightly better i guess? I didn’t really need or want to test it’s durability again again.

7. RUST WASHES

Made from the same Citadel paints as before but thinned with water and with a couple drops of drying retarder and flow-aid added. Made the wash more orange-coloured and just started having it pool up around the details of the model. Because it was something I made on my own, I over-thinned it by accident and had to do this multiple times for it to be noticeable. I tried to do some streaking too when the paint got a bit thicker. It didn’t show up too well on the dark blue but came out really fantastic on the light blue. Was interesting to do as I’ve never done anything with custom washes before. When the orange wash was dried, I mixed the remaining wash into some Vallejo Sepia Shade 73.200 and applied it in crevices where the orange wash was too bright (like the details on the head)

8. PAINT THE SENSORS

The sensors were really simple. Along with the mono-eye, there are 2 sensors on each shoulder and 2 on each “disc” on the hips. Painted the mono-eye with a darker red for the base, bright red around the border, deeper red dot in the middle, and painted the top quarter of the border with a reddish orange.

Almost exactly like this.

The sensors on the hips and shoulders were done the same without the center dot.

Finally something posted on this blog! The YMS-03 Waff!

I really enjoy how this kit looks, the sort of mashing between a Zaku I and a Dom is really something that appeals to me. Did this kit a lot faster than I normally would cause I finally got myself a pair of God Hand nippers! These things are absolutely fantastic although I have to get used to using them since there were a couple of tricks I used to do (mainly angle of cutting) to get slightly cleaner cuts with my Tamiya nippers. Gouged the plastic in some places so i might have to patch that up for painting. I did some panel lining on this since I had a Gundam marker that was the perfect shade for that light blue-grey plastic. That and I haven’t done any good ol’ panel lining in a while. I might be painting this in Dom colours if I can focus my efforts this week but we will see what happens since I’ll have to strip the panel lines and clean it which I’m normally really lazy to do.

I’ve pretty much put painting the Hi-Mock on hold since I’m still working on the backpack as I keep on wanting to add stuff to it. All these except for the chain gun and its ammo drums need gaps filled and to be mucked up using Mr. Surfacer. Another task I’ve given myself is finding mounting solutions for the weapons.

Properly mounting the cannon might be tough because unlike the missile pod, it cant be rotated with the joint it was designed with. If I had more scratch-building knowledge or pla-plate maybe I could come up with something to make that possible but I can’t get any materials like that now. I’m also not gluing the two parts of the barrel together in case its too long when posed in the “inactive” position. If that happens, then I’ll have to figure out a way to mount the business end of the barrel to the backpack. 

Getting the chain-gun to attach might be tough as well but I’m thinking that a peg made of runner should do it. I plan to attach the gun itself to the right of where that white armor is but I’m not so sure about the ammo drums. Speaking of that white armor, it’s made from the Ez-ARMS kit and is originally a kind of forearm armor. I snipped and filed down the right side to fit on the pack and around the exhaust piping i made as well as making a gap on the left side so that the attachment port could be used.