MG 1/100 Gundam Unicorn

Model Kit: Gundam Unicorn
Scale: 1/100
Grade: Master Grade
Year Made: 2008
Misc: only painted in certain areas (i.e. inner frame, feet, backpack)
Camera: Canon EOS 400D
Last Updated: May 25, 2008

So I finally found some time to start working on my MG Unicorn, or at least one of the two kits that Chil bought me for my birthday. Bought some small alligator clamps that I mounted on some sticks to use as piece holders when I need to paint over those nubs that I had to sand down after removing them from the runners.

This seems to be the cleanest kit I’ve actually done by far. Good to know that I’m improving kit-building-wise rather than degrading…

This is my dad’s mat and I found that it fits nicely on top of the center table which is my current makeshift workstation. Those are old spraycans from my previous model kit works. Some of them still have a smidgen of paint left. Really need to get myself an airbrush and mini-compressor.

These are the runners for the gray parts. The plastic is a lighter shade of gray which made the kit look a bit dull. So I had previously purchased a can of Gunship Gray which is even darker than German Gray. I’m liking the result.

More of them gray runners. That’s Glu-Tack over there, I’m thinking there will be some parts that might come off loose so I’m trying to see this as an alternative since super glue melts the ABS plastic which is not nice.

Part of the inner collar of the torso area after respraying it with some paint. Buying that expensive painting mount wasn’t within my budget so I went to a local hardware store, bought those small alligator clamps and mounted them on some sticks I found in the house: chopsticks, which I happen to have a lot of.

Front and back of the half-completed torso. Nice thing about this kit is that you don’t need to do panel lining to make this actually look good. And by the looks of it, painting is also minimal.

More progress pics later in the day. Thank goodness, I also have a tripod. My hands are really shaky so holding up the camera with one hand and holding the pieces would have resulted in far more horrible pictures.

Ok, so I had a big booboo that put my kit-building activities to a halt today. I was experimenting painting the thrusters and I made a couple of mistakes.

1. I forgot to put on latex gloves. Thus, I easily got paint on my hands.
2. I forgot to make the pieces stick to the tape. When I started spraying, two thrusters flew away and got smudged and dirty.
3. My hands are dirty now and majority of what I’m currently doing involved a lot of white pieces. Uncool.
   
4. No I don’t have thinner in the house at the moment.

So there. I’ll probably continue working on the kit tomorrow or one of these days during the week. Hopefully. >_<;

But I have pictures!

More when I move on with building the kit. It’s only the first kit. T_T But it’s good to learn from all my mistakes from this kit before I move to the permanently-Destroy-Mode version.

Also known as “Hardly Got Any Work Done”. I was only able to partially finish the waist part of the unit, specifically only up to the front skirts. I tried painting over the dark/navy blue parts of the kit. One of the drawbacks of spraycans also reared its ugly head during that time. Since they’re spraycans, you really don’t have much control on how thick the can will lay on the paint and spraying too far from the pieces wastes a lot of paint since you also don’t get to control the cover radius of the spray. So some parts of the pieces had some paint beading up or accumulating when I had it dry out. So in the end, I had to sand down these areas which was fine by me since I’ll be sanding off the nubs anyways. At least I could get all the sanding done in one go. I’ll be redoing the paint again hopefully within this week. Hopefully.

Here are some shots. Pardon the inconsistencies in leveling. I usually don’t need to do much level editing in Photoshop but since it was getting dim outside during this time, I couldn’t tell the differences.

I wasn’t able to shoot pictures of the finished arms and shoulders so here they are now.

I’m quite happy with how the hands turned out. They’re a lot, lot neater than the ones I’ve made in the past, particularly the Gundam ver. OYW hands.

Sanded down blue parts.