the Sirbine has been my dream kit for years upon years now, but given that it's not only a P-Bandai product but a discontinued P-Bandai product, i assumed i'd simply never find one that wouldn't cost me an arm and a leg on ebay...and, well, i was half-right on that, because it cost me an arm and a leg at my local model shop instead. such is the way.
not much to be said about the build or paint process—used a nice little glitter coat on the wings, and experimented with doing the outer armor's panel lines and details in gold. it worked out well! the build was fine apart from some annoying issues with the shoulder and wing joints popping out. all completely worth it for a bug as pretty as this guy.
also this kit featured literally the smallest sticker i've ever seen in my life. it was like a singular shining dust mote. i was in awe.
it's meant to go on the forehead filigree but this thing was genuinely tinier than some of the decals i've had to put on my RGs. i did in fact lose it forever at some point during the build process and i don't think anyone in the world would ever know it if i didn't tell them first. fascinating plamo design.
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A fallen angel is transformed into a ferocious devil. Its armor of Virtue discarded, the Nadleeh Hellhound's GN Drive is pushed beyond the limits of Trans-Am to power lightning-fast melee attacks. Its beastly claws and legs are capable of tearing through both GN Particle fields and traditional metal armor with ease, and the shield attached to its tail cable emits a special coating of particles that disrupts and absorbs enemy beam attacks, funneling the excess energy back into its GN Drive for maximum power efficiency. If the tail cable is severed, the shield can temporarily operate as a self-propelled unit, expertly maneuvered by its pilot's quantum brainwaves.
build details under the cut!
this kitbash design originates from me seeing someone on twitter who had the idea to attach a gundam's elbow and arm joints to the ankles of another gundam to make digitigrade legs. i was enthralled. i was amazed. i had to try it myself. and what better way to do that than with Iron-Blooded Orphans's ol' reliable Barbie Lupus Rex and one of my favorite gundams in Gundam 00, Nadleeh!
this was my very first time buying two full kits with the intent to fuse them into one kit, though much more of Nadleeh was used than Barbatos. some glue was required—notably on the v-fin (which is just Barbie's horns glued on top of a trimmed-down version of Nadleeh's v-fin to get it to fit to the head) and two points on each ankle (for stability)—but for the most part this was just about trimming and/or mangling a few pieces to get everything to fit together. the little bits of lightning on the forehead and eye were snipped off some spare parts from my bootleg Lfrith Anavata and then painted red.
speaking of painting things red, that whole process made this build way WAY messier than it had to be, but it was tons of fun and totally worth it. no stickers were used on this kit at all (from either source), but i did end up using EX metallic red, Trans-Am holographic red (for the "hair" and the GN cables on the ankles), a metallic red and gold mix (for the horns and gold accents), black (for the eye mask), chrome (for the underside of the GN condensers), and red sharpie (for the topside of the GN condensers).
posing this one was exactly as weird and hard as i thought it would be. i didn't feel like topcoating it (MISTAKE), so there's only a few places you can actually hold it for pose manipulation purposes without smudging a bunch of red dye everywhere. glad to put it up on my shelf and not have to touch it anymore!
i'm not sure what to do with the ~60% of a Barbatos i still have left over. spare parts for some other kitbash project someday, i guess? for now, it shall simply live in a box beneath my display cabinet...
haven't watched GQuuuuuuX and probably never will, but somebody out there in its world must've had the idea to steal one of those police zakus and re-purpose it for the underground street fight clanbattles. this custom build is for them. and for me. fuck cops
more weathering adventures on this one + some forays into deliberate scuffs and battle damage! i accidentally used my shine silver EX marker instead of the original silver marker, so the weathering is lighter and shinier than my original vision. ah, well. still works great, especially after a matte topcoat. the other details were painted in EX metallic red, EX new white, DSPIAE black, and DSPIAE gunmetal, along with a bunch of assorted random colors for the graffiti on the left leg. bonus challenge: spot the haro!
gotta say, it's so much fun to paint details on something with the intent of having it look sloppy and messy and scrawled. i enjoyed it with my zabanya and i enjoyed it here, too. really eases up on the stresses of hand-painting.
the build itself was really kind of incredible, too. very detailed, lots of surprisingly neat articulation (i especially love that you can move the mono-eye!), runners aplenty. still crazy that this is just what new high grades are like these days. if this is the standard we have going on, i gotta get my hands on some other GQuuuuuuX kits...
finally finished, and this one may be my best custom yet: introducing the HG Gundam Zabanya (Last Stand Ver.)!
this one's been a looooong time coming, and what a fun ride it was!! the top shelf of my first gunpla display case has, naturally, always been reserved for 00 kits (and sometimes their build fighters/divers variants—looking at you, cherudim saga and 00 diver arc), and with the current setup i have in there, i knew that i probably only had room for one more gundam, so that gundam damn well better be a good one.
and oh my god was this a good one. full breakdown under the cut.
the build itself, being a high grade from 2010, wasn't really anything special, but who cares about that, i got to try out WEATHERING for the first time! weathering fucking rules. you take your marker ink and the shittiest, stiffest paintbrush you own and you just absolutely go to town. how could i not love that. brilliant exercise, gorgeous final product, this will definitely not be the last time i do this to a kit.
the gold, silver, gunmetal, metallic red, bright metallic green, and some of the white was also handpainted, and the crystal over the forehead sensor was sharpie-dyed with navy blue. this kit comes with a ton of stickers for color accuracy (a common issue with HG 00 kits) but thanks to all this paintwork i ended up barely using any of them.
that snazzy gun comes as a donation from my spare parts box, since i wasn't really a fan of the two rifles that come with the base kit. i honestly have no idea what kit it's originally from (EDIT: i have now been informed that it was MG kyrios's submachine gun), but it was basically one solid hunk of grey plastic with a single green sticker on it before i jazzed it up with all the gunmetal and the weathering.
this kit also served as a trial run for my new DSPIAE gunmetal brush pen, and i'm very pleased with how it looks and how it felt to use! if other DSPIAE markers are as good as this one, consider me sold. prone to scratching, though, so definitely a marker better served for accent pieces or parts you're not expecting to handle very much.
the cloak was just some cheap amazon purchase, i think. smelled awful for whatever reason. works great, though, especially once i roughed it up a bit with scissors. there's a little wire in the collar that keeps it scrunched shut around the head.
the ELS crystallization was done with the same trick i used on my ELS Brave: cut up a couple (in this case, two) spare beam saber blades into a variety of pointy shapes, glue 'em on, paint 'em silver.
i think the lore i was going for with this custom design was that this was from a version of A Wakening of the Trailblazer where the fight(s) with the ELS went on for much longer, thus prompting a more last-ditch, ragged appearance from zabanya (hence the name Last Stand). i'm sure setsuna will take care of things before those ELS crystals spread too much further, though...!
and, finally, since that big cloak and all those ELS crystals do cover up quite a bit, here's some photos i took of just the kit by itself in all its weathered glory.
with this, my MG dynames, and the cherudim saga type.y2k, i've finally built (a version of) all three lockon stratos gundams. here's hoping they make something new and fun for lyle to fly in 2027 (and then a tiny plastic version for me to put in my house!)
finished build: SNAA Iron Sickle (or maybe it's called the Iron Sickle Kay...?)
this was a neat one! i was drawn over to the SNAA lineup by their low price point—this guy was easily on par with any bandai real grade for less than half the cost—and a few glowing reviews from the often-frightful world of gunpla reviewers.
full thoughts below!
i wasn't entirely sure what to expect, other than a theoretically snazzy-looking final product, and i was very pleasantly surprised! this knightly fellow comes with a complete inner frame that comes together beautifully, if a little harshly on my fingertips (lots of teeny-tiny pieces that need to be pressed together with Great Force to get them to snap), and the armor on top has a bunch of cool layering that feels great to build and looks even better on the shelf.
did some more painting on this one to once again do battle with my age-old nemesis, Yellow Plastic. the blue is approximately a 50/50 blend of metallic blue and holographic blue gundam marker ink. i used a spraypaint on the sickle, scythes, and shield that was supposed to be chrome, but ended up just being pale silver. ah, well. still looks good.
like with my full-mech aerial, which shares a pretty similar color palette to my iron sickle, the panel lining on all the white pieces was done with a blue archival ink finetip pen, with grey and black panel liner markers used on all the grey and black pieces, respectively.
if the other SNAA kits are even half as good as this guy, they can consider me sold on 'em. highly recommend this kit to any gunpla builders looking to branch out from first-party bandai kits.
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it seems you bitches have come to a standstill on my gunpla poll of tumblr dot com
which has left it up to Me to choose my next project. with 3 votes each for raphael and barbatos, and 1 vote for the banshee norn, the choice was ultimately pretty easy:
IT'S HEINDREE TIME, BABY
experimented with color-shift spraypaint on this one (on top of a black basecoat, as was recommended to me by the paint can) and the results are absolutely stunning. took considerably more effort than a tamiya spray would have but oh my god it was worth it. look at my beautiful boy.
video of the color-shift effect in action under the cut
[ID: A silent video of the HG Heindree, showing off how its armor changes color from turquoise to blue to purple as light passes over it.]
sometimes i name my recolors and sometimes i don't. this time i did! As You Might Expect, i'm a big fan of Cherudim and especially a big fan of the Cherudim SAGA (short for Special Assault Gundam Arms), also delightfully known as the Cherudim Seven Guns. (they call it that on account of its seven guns, you see.)
i would've loved for the original Cherudim SAGA to have its own kit (its armor is black! very sleek! very cool!), but alas, the only one that actually exists is build fighters' Type.GBF recolor, which puts it in this brownish-greyish urban camo palette that i absolutely cannot stand (sorry, yuuki). so i got the kit, got my paints, and got to work!
i used tamiya light gunmetal spray on the guns and the armor, hand-painted the mint green accents with a 60-40ish ratio of metallic green and ex new white gundam marker paint, and did all the panel lines in a green archival ink pen. the end result reminded me of those old teal iMac G3s i so adored in my elementary school computer lab, hence the designation "Type.Y2K".
very pleased with it, especially the hand-painted parts! i've truly become some kind of Paintbrush Fiend lately...
man, this kit was fun. both the HG Aerial Rebuild and the HG Moon Gundam are fantastic kits on their own, and with a little paint and a little glitter, we've got two great tastes that taste great together, baby!
the paint here was a combination of tamiya metallic black spray + rustoleum glitter topcoat for the armor and weapons, and gundam EX metallic red marker + DSPIAE fluorescent green marker for the accents. the only real hurdle came when i ran out of the black paint halfway through and had to go out and get some more a few days later.
parts came from the Aerial Rebuild and Moon Gundam (obviously), 00 Diver Arc (sword), Perfect Strike Freedom Rouge (rifle), and Dragon Gundam (effect part at the end of the rifle). used a little bit of glue to affix the effect part to the end of the rifle, the rest was all snap-fit—didn't even have to do anything special to get that moon on Aerial's back, since the backpack pegs fit perfectly!
...now i just have to figure out what to do with a moonless Moon Gundam...
oh, yeah, and that fluorescent green marker sure does fluoresce. video below the cut!
[Video ID: The fluorescent green highlights on the Aerial Bloodmoon shining under a blacklight.]
