#model building

30MS SIS-J00 Merunja

I'm back with yet another 30 Minutes Sisters build! This time, it's Merunja, fighting Ilshana for title of most chuuni 30MS design. Merunja is the newest 30MS design, and seemingly the most complete out of the box. Unlike a lot of the 30MS line, which are designed with the aim of compatibility and combination with 30MF and 30MM parts (see the other recent 30MS kit, Marical), Merunja lacks pretty much all standard 3mm hardpoints, and a lot of the suggested customisation seems to be from completely exchanging her body parts.

Merunja is almost completely a by-the-book build. I've given everything a thorough panel lining, using my grey liner more like a wash over the fabric parts to heavily accent the wrinkly textures (especially on her sleeves and bloomers). For her extensive skin segments, I applied my Tamiya Weather Master H set to establish plenty of blush and skin pigment variation, giving her skin a much warmer and more realistic look. Other than that, she's almost entirely out-of-box. There's some really clever techniques in her build, especially with her two-toned hair, which involes threading her twintails together to achieve a properly layered look.

Despite being very limited in terms of customisation options, Merunja has plenty of in-box optional parts. Her floppy, almost straightjacket-like sleeves can be removed to insert her hand options (the standard open hand and open and closed fist set found in most 30MS kits). Because the sleeve-extension parts use a 3mm peg, there's a new wrist joint part (although for some reason there are only four included, so you need to swap the non-open fist hand options between the two useable wrist parts).

The major acessory is her large pink chainsaw. You can remove the handles to slide them into her open-fist hand options, and it can be held at a variety of angles. There's a set of special elastic sticker decals depicting paint splatters which, with some encouragement, mould closely to the underlying complex detail (such as on the chainsaw's chain).

There's also a small plush bear. This is a reliatively simple side build but it has impressive colour separation for a build that, in older kits, would probably require painting. There's even a degree of poseability in the bear's arms and legs, and it can be gently nestled in Merunja's arms without falling out. Unfortunately it cannot stand independently. According to the manual, Merunja often talks to it, but it never replies.

The kit includes a special hairpiece that lets you swap out and remove Merunja's hood. There's also special ankle pieces you can swap in to remove her legwarmers and expose her striped thigh-highs. This reveals that her footwear is simply a set of slippers, that can also be removed to show a new "sock-covered foot" mould with a greater level of detail.

Merunja comes with a set of adhesive eyepatches. The eyepatches can be applied over the tampo-printed face options, giving them the realisitic impression that they're sitting loosely over her eye. Swapping her face parts with the face options lacking the eyepatch allows for some cute storytelling.

Despite the clear trend away from customisation and upgradability with a lot of the recent 30MS releases, the build itself was super enjoyable and makes use of a lot of really well thought out building techniques to preserve colour separation. I'm also a big fan of a lot of the recent 30MS moulds, which have promoted a greater focus on accurately rendering textures. I'm really looking forward to what Bandai is planning for the series in the future! Next up, I'm going to try and tackle some kits that have been in my backlog for a really long time.

HGIBO Tekkadan 3rd Group Gundam Frame ASW-G-08 "Gundam Barbatos Adapt"

After many years, I'm returning to the HGIBO line with the new HGIBO Barbatos Adapt. I've never been the biggest fan of the HGIBO line, due to the reliative weakness of the polycaps used (especially with the narrow-waisted Gundam Frame kits) and the poor colour correction with heavy sticker usage. While this allowed the kits to be very simple, interchangeable, and cheap, I always felt that this made the build experience less enjoyable as compared to the follow up HGWFM series. This new kit is a total reimagining of the line however. There's still a lot of stickers, but the build experience is significantly more modern.

The Barbatos Adapt is an intermediary form between the 6th form destroyed in the Battle of Edmonton at the end of Season 1 of Iron Blooded Orphans, and the Barbatos Lupus that was built offscreen between seasons and debuts in the first episode of Season 2. Most of the damanged nanolaminate armour is stripped off, replaced with sections of unpainted chassis or exposed frame, and you can still see the missing section of the V-fin that was broken off during the Battle of Edmonton. There's a new set of boosters (reminiscent of the 5th form) and some new shoulder armour pieces as well.

Unlike many of the earlier HGIBO kits, the colour correction is significantly more tolerable. There's a new head mould that separates the grey details on the faceplate, and there's a lot of decent parts choices and re-moulds that help give the kit better separation and an overall more polished look. You can really see the difference in level of detail when you directly compare this build to the older HGIBO Barbatos (although some of the improvement is also due to my better Gunpla skills). I did end up cutting off all of the safety nubs to help accentuate the sharper design of the various fins (as IBO has always had a very angular style).

There's still a reliance on stickers, including some white ones for the upper arms that I ended up keeping (as working with white paint sucks). There's several grey sections on the boosters, waist, and arms that I painted, along with the exposed V-fin frame and some smaller details on the head that don't have corrective stickers. You also need to correct some of the yellow vent details on the leg boosters and a brown detail on one of the neck armour "fins".

There's a small detail sticker for the Tekkadan logo on the left shoulder, but given that it's a rather ugly foil sticker, I elected to use spare stickers from my MGSD Barbatos instead. I supplemented a lot of spare stickers to help give the kit a nice amount of extra detail. I also ended up painting the Gundam Frame logos on this kit with my fluorescent orange marker, rather than using the foil stickers, as the provided stickers are not metallic and look very flat.

The kit is overall a lot more poseable, owing to a complete rework of the HGIBO Gundam Frame. The shoulders , torso, and waist have been completely redone with extra parts giving the kit the ability to flex laterally as well as forwards and backwards. There's even a few parts that give the illusion of articulating pistons just like the ones present on the MG and MGSD versions. There's new hip parts that let the legs swing much further forwards, and there's a new shoulder design that lets the arms articulate to a much wider degree of motion.

In terms of weaponry, the Barbatos Adapt is very limited. There's a redesigned large katana, similar to the version wielded by the 4th form but much larger in size, paired with a small wakizashi-style blade intended for additional defense, both supplied byt Teiwaz and initially intended for purely cermonial use. In the short video in which the Adapt appears, both of these blades break very easily, hence the much more robust sword eventualyl developed for the Lupus. Both of these swords are neatly stored on the boosters.

This was a really fun build to put together. It looks a lot sharper and more impressive than the older HGIBO kits, and I really hope that we see the new HGIBO Gundam Frame used for some HGIBO revives, especially with the 10th anniversary having just passed. Until then, I'll keep patiently waiting for Bandai to make a MG Barbatos Lupus Rex.

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!