That Bitch From Mercury

Cruelty of the highest order - I can't possibly order all 8!!!

HG 1/144 Prototype Earth Federation Forces Mobile Suit RX-78-3 "G3 Gundam (Trans Pride Livery)" [Beyond Global] (Bling Knockoff)

Happy Pride everyone!!! This year's pride month build is pretty similar to last year's, adding a trans pride colour scheme and gradient shield onto an otherwise pretty standard kit.

This kit is a Bling knockoff of the Beyond Global version of the RX-78-2, with a custom cyan/magenta colour scheme that I felt would fit perfectly with a trans pride build. Bling's knockoff is pretty much identical to the base RX-78-2 Beyond Global, however unfortunately instead of recoloring the plastic for this scheme, they've simply painted over the sprue, which meant I needed to manually paint over all the nub marks. It's otherwise a very impressive knockoff, with smooth painting, perfect detail, and even a set of knockoff G3 decals with plenty of spares for customisation. The G3 is essentially another RX-78 that made it off Side 7 in pieces, and in the novels replaced Amuro's main Gundam later in the series.

The Beyond Global kit is nominally a High Grade, but it's designed to have as much articulation as possible, and be as colour separated and detailed as a Real Grade kit. There's a ton of articulation, including pivots at both the wrists and upper arm, a cleverly designed shoulder and torso for shoulder articulation, and even a torso flexion and ab-crunch! It can easily get a to lot of the human-like poses you see in the anime.

Apart from fixing up the visible nub marks with an extra layer of paint, and a basic silver and gunmetal weathering for all the grey parts, I added a trans flag and a trans rondel to emphasize the trans-flag adjacent colour scheme. I'm really proud of how the flag turned out, as I feel it's representative of my improved masking skills. The rondel is a little messy, unfortunately, but I still think it adds to the kit. I also ended up painting the eyes and head sensors with my gold marker, which helps them stand out, especially since there weren't any foil stickers included.

Apart from this, the kit was so well colour separated that there was no need for any further touch ups, apart from applying decals. I'm not sure what decal sheet was included, but it's one of the highest quality decal sets I've ever used. The decals are fairly durable and extremely thin, with minimal borders, and they lay super flat against the model. After topcoating, they look as though they've been tampo printed onto the kit, unlike Bandai's, which often notably stick up a little from the surface. I was even able to mask and paint on top of one on the thigh with no issues.

There's a nice little instruction sheet induced for decal placement, but I also improvised a little and included a few of my own spare decals to help bring everything together, especially on the shield and the beam rifle.

As above, the kit is super poseable, and can easily hit and maintain a lot of anime accurate poses, especially given the lack of polycap usage (although a lot of the plastic parts still resemble the polycaps they were derived from). I had a lot of fun trying out poses I couldn't quite hit with my older Origin version of the RX-78-2.

This kit comes with a few hand options for posing, including an open left hand, two open fists for the beam sabers and shield, and a right hand pistol grip. There's also the standard gundam Beam Rifle, with a little peg for attaching to the rear skirt, and both a curved and straight beam saber effect for different poses.

Overall, this is one of my favorite builds so far. I really enjoyed the decal process, and I love how the unique colour scheme helps it stand out on my shelf.

MDX-SRZ Gundam Rozeit

This one's been a long time coming. I've had the 3 kits necessary for this one lying around for forever, and I finally got around to building it. And I did have more plans for this one? Not the kit specifically, but I wanted to turn the Dilanza and Darilbalde into Beetle Bits akin to what I did for my Aerial Custom, but I couldn't get them to look how I wanted. Main suit turned out great, though.

The Details: There wasn't much when it comes to alterations on this one. All I really did was cut and shape the horns, which does give it a different feel from the original.

For colors, I wanted to go with pink, partly because I like the shade, but also because it felt like it fit Guel, and I do like Guel. Other than that I went with my standard black and gold, with a dash of silver to help break things up since I was relegating the pink to just the right side of the body for aesthetic reasons.

As for general customization, I had 3 of these on hand, so I took the swords from two of them and used them for weapons, and I used the bits from 3 of them for the backpack. The two on the back are the general wing formation for the Schwarzette, but with four of the same orientation of Bits per side. On the hips, I changed up the formation slightly just to have everything line up better.

Overall, this was the last planned custom I had for the stuff from G-Witch, and while it wasn't my most ambitious, it did turn out nice. I have a few other customs planned, all of which have a bit more ambition to them, but I'm missing at least 1 kit for each, so I'll have to wait until I get to those. In the meantime, I guess it's back to straight builds for a bit.

finally managed to find some time to build my first kit and it was a joy!

I had heard these kits were very well engineered but was still surprised at just how good the whole process felt, i can't wait to get my teeth sunk into the next kit.

I decided to start with Gundam Lfrith Thorn as she's one of my favs from my fav show and im even more in love with her design than i was before.

(more pics of the process below the cut)