#model building

30MF 1/12 Drloskeleton

30 Minutes Fantasy is back, with a really really interesting new kit, the Drloskeleton twin set! This is a realiatively simple set, consisting of two simple but super detailed skelton figures and a few extra weapons.

The skeletons themeselves are moulded in a simple slightly off-white plastic to give off an "aged bone" appearance. I lined everything in a pretty heavy run of Tamiya brown enamel panel liner, using it as more of a wash than a liner, which really helped to accentuate the aged and dirty look. This is a really detailed kit, but to help it look more detailed, I painted a few small cracks in with white paint, as well as some smudges of a red gloss paint to give the build an almost bloodied appearance. I made sure to add in some various runes to imply the magical processes behind ressurecting the skeletons as well.

The weapons got my usual metallic weathering, with some heavy patches of rust. The rust pigment powder in particular played really well with the large areas of pitting detail moulded into the weapons. I also painted the eyes to help them stand out within the sockets (as they're recessed really far back into the orbits), but unfortnuately they don't stand out in my photos as well as they do in real life.

The build itself includes a lot of hidden hinges and ball joints to give them some really impressive articulation and range of movement. There's a neat little feature that allows you to open up the jaw. The kit includes two sets of hands - an open outstretched hand option and a set of open fists to hold the various weapons.

There are three weapons included in the separate weapons sprue; a sort of falchion, a cleaver, and a small knife. There's also a polearm adaptor to which the various weapons can be attached to create a spear or a glaive. There's also a sort of thick chain piece that can be used as armour for the skeletons, which attaches to one of the several 3mm pegs on the back.

There's quite a few points of attachment hidden alongside all of the bony detail that makes these skeletons compatible with some of the armour sets from the 30MF line (and probablyt the 30MS and 30MM line as well). I might pick up one of the option armour sets in the future to help give these skeletons a little more customisation.

These skeletons pair up really nicely with my other 30MF kits, like the Rosan Holy Knight I built earlier this year.

Overally this was a fun and super quick little side project. The skeletons go together very quickly and I'm sure they'd be perfect for army building. If I ever get a larger display case I definitely want to try customising a new set of these with one of the proper armour sets. I definitely reccomend picking up a few of these if you can find them.

HGUC 1/144 E.F.S.F Mass Produced Mobile Suit RGM-89 "Jegan" [Axis Shock Image Color]

The Jegan is back!! This time I've build the High Grade counterpart to the MG Jegan I built last week, in the Gundam Base exclusive "Axis Shock" recolour. I've build one of the Axis Shock kits before, the GM-III. Just like that kit, this HG has been redesigned with a somewhat sepia colour-shift and with a gloss metallic injection plastic.

The HG Jegan is surprisingly almost as colour separated as its MG counterpart, with the same separation for the shield missiles, grenades, and cockpit. However, due to the scale-down, there's no separation at all for the various thrusters and verniers. I've gone through and added a metallic gold to all of these parts, as well as on the Federation chevron on the waist. While these would usually be yellow, I feel like the gold ties in nicely to the metallic gloss look of this colourway. There's also plenty of areas that need grey colour correction, including the conduits on the verniers and sections on the soles of the feet.

As usual I added plenty of soot staining around the various thrusters and veriners, and a small amount of sponge chipping around various raised edges to help give the build a more worn-out look. A lot of the grey frame parts are actualy recreated in a dark metallic red, so I didn't end up having to do much frame weathering, outside a few of the joint pieces. To match the colour-shift I weathered these in a copper colour rather than my usual gunmetal.

The kit includes a small collection of stickers, however this is clearly just the standard Jegan sticker-sheet. I ended up poaching the leftover shiny sticker decals from my Axis Shock GM-III so that they'd match the shiny look of the kit. There don't appear to be any metallic stickers for the various sensors, which was a shame, but everything is nicely supplemented with my own metallic markers. I added a little chrome behind the visor as usual, and it really pops with this kit.

In terms of acessories, the kit is fairly limited. There's two open fist options, and a single right-handed pistol grip for the Jegan's beam-rifle. The shield is pretty much the same as the Master Grade version, although with a little less detail. It attaches with the standard mid-2010s HGUC shield adaptor. The beam rifle is also fairly similar, although of course you can't remove the E-Pack magazine.

The beam saber holster is also simplified, lacking the hinged section of the Master Grade, however it's still fairly similar, and can pop out of the holster with the aid of a set of tweezers. There's a somewhat odd flat beam saber effect part in the usual trans-light pink.

The kit isn't the most flexible, with fairly limited flexion at the knees and elbows. There's a neat little swivelling section on the hip's ball joint part to help provide more dynamic hip flexion, and you can still get some nice poses out of the kit with the right angles. I did find the articulation very stiff however, likely a side-effect of the different tolerances of the gloss metallic plastic as compared to the basic plastic the kit was designed for.

All in all it was a very pleasureable building experience, and I'm glad to add more builds to my GM collection. I have a few more unique Jegans from Gundam Unicorn coming up, as well as a lot of other interesting kits in my backlog, so keep an eye out!

you can change your destiny toki no mukō

you can change your future yami no mukō

we can share the happiness sagashite yuku

yurushi aeru sono hi wo...

MG 1/100 E.F.S.F Mass-Produced Mobile Suit RGM-89 "Jegan"

It's been a really long work in progress, but it's finally ready! I've really been enjoying a lot of these "older" MGs from the 2010s, and the MG Jegan is no exception, easily being on par with the MG GM Command I built a few months ago.

The Jegan is the Earth Federation's next-gen version of the GM, evolving from technology developed for the GM-III and Nemo, and deployed contemperaneously to the GM-III during the early UC 90s. The Jegan replaced the GM as the Federation's main Mass Production platform well into the UC 120s.

Unlike the MG GM Command, the MG Jegan is completely colour correct, incorporating special insert parts to recreate the yellow colour on the inside of the thruster nozzles and various vernier surfaces. The painting required for this build was very minimal, consisting of mostly weathering. I did end up painting some of the wire conduits on the backpack verniers red (for a little extra visual interest), and as usual I added plenty of chrome paint behind the visor to help it pop. I also added some gold detailling on the beam rifle and on some of the exposed frame parts.

This kit recieved my usual weathering, with a metallic drybrush in dark gunmetal over all of the grey sections, topped with some metallic pigment powder. Due to the unique blue-ish colour of the metallic frame parts, I skipped my silver metalic drybrush to help maintain the stock colours of the kit. The nozzle of the beam rifle was painted in medium gunmetal, with some heat bluing effects over the top. I also hit a lot of the armour parts with a nice sponge chipping, layering black, gunmetal, and a little silver pigment powder for what I think turned out to be a super convincing effect. Of course, all of the exposed verier and thruster vents got a thourough soot-stain with pigment powder over black stippling.

As usual with my MG builds, I gave the pilot a nicely detailed paintjob. I think this is probably one of the best results I've been able to achieve with these so far. The cockpit can open rather satisfactorily compared to other builds, but unfortunately the pilot figure is still barely visible.

There's a nice assortment of stickers included in the set, in mostly the same style as the ones included in the MG GM Command. I supplemented them with spares from my various HGGTO GMs that I've spent the last few months putting together, to help give the otherwise simple design a super detailled look. The sticker sheet includes stickers for the Londo Bell group, a unit organised by Bright Noa and Amuro Ray during the end of the first Neo Zeon War, as featured in Char's Counterattack (appropriate, given that this version of the Jegan is designed after the version from the movie). I labelled this as Unit 08, as this represents my 8th proper Master Grade build.

Just like the MG GM Command and MG DX, the MG Jegan features a single set of hands with poseable thumbs and swappable pre-posed fingers. There's closed fist, open "holding" fists, open hand, and one pistol grip option to choose from. There's also a small adaptor for an Action Base, using the larger plug.

The Jegan, despite being fairly simple, features a lot of really neat gimmicks and acessories. Mounted on the head is a communications antenna with a small beam vulcan, similar to the standard vulcan designed to attach to the Mk-II Gundam. There's a basic beam rifle, designed as a significant improvement from the version used on the Nemo, GM-II, and GM-III, and also featured on the MG Narrative Gundam. This also has a removable E-Pack, althought there's only one included in the build. Unlike the magazine from the MG GM Command, this E-Pack can be held by the open "holding" fist.

The classic coffin-shaped shield has been updated in the Jegan, with a set of 4 small missiles that can be launched from the shield. The attachment is otherwise fairly simple, which allows for some pretty fluid posing with the shield.

On the left hip is a set of throwable grenades. Both in this kit as well as in the ECOAS Jegan in Gundam Unicorn the grenades appear to be chained together as a single throwable unit, however they seem to have been intended as a set of three individual grenades. They can be securely held using the open hand and poseable thumb.

On the right hip is a single small beam saber in a quite nicely designed holster. The holster can pivot outwards to allow the beam saber to be picked up.

There are two large beam saber effects included, in the same trans-light pink as the MG GM Command and a lot of the older HGUC kits.

This kit is super poseable, and I had a lot of fun recreating some of the iconic poses, including the Ver. Ka. pose and the pose of some of the suits during the Axis Shock.

Currently, this build is easily my favourite Master Grade build experience. It's super satisfying to pose, with absolutely no polycap parts, and the design is deceptively simple with a ton of hidden detail.

I'm looking forward to comparing this to the HGUC versions in the future, so keep an eye out for future builds!

Over a decade ago, in 2012, I bought the Bandai transforming Valkyrie kits with Super/Fast packs. One Hikaru use VF-1A/S, and one Roy Fokker VF1-S. This wonderful pile of parts *should* be everything for the basic Valk, with the Strike parts off in their own baggies.

I cut all the parts out, painted the frame parts, stuck them in a bag (apparently figuring that "white parts over here, grey parts over there and I'll figure out the rest later was good enough) and then left it til now. My friends and I made our own little Zaku II squadron for Wonderfest, and after that was finished up we talked about doing a squad of Valkyries out of the Hasegawa kits. As a warmup for my aircraft painting skills, I dug these apparently rare badboys up and....wilted. because look at that. No runner markings. No separation on things. Just about nothing to go on.

So I set to splitting things up based on part size and looking for the parts I needed to get started. Before I can really dig in to this build, I gotta figure out where stuff like seamlines are at and how I'm gonna deal with those so a test build is absolutely required. I used to just chop my parts off the runner and then cut the nubs off with a hobby knife so there are some sections where I need to do some light sanding or filling with putty to restore the correct shape but it looks like for the most part I was pretty careful about taking too much plastic off back then. Nice work, 2012 me.