Oh yeah Meeple is great. Just wish they had more in stock! Cleaned up my detolfs over the last week so thought I'd take some shots of my favorite lads.
I think that's an across-the-board problem. In the same way that Lego has been sold out of many of their big-ticket items for the last several months, many Gunpla shops have also seen their selection dwindling. These last ~4 months have seen a surge in hobbyists with excess time on their hands, for obvious reasons, so they've been stocking up. Even a lot of the larger shops like Hobby Search and Amiami have seen their selection dwindle in the last little while, especially in the MG range. My local haunts used to have quite a good selection as well, but finally checking in on them recently, they're in a similar boat, with most of the back-catalogue of MG kits in short supply, with only recent releases/re-releases being rather plentiful.
How'd you do the thin silver lines on the dark blue portions of the head? Those edge lines are so thin and crisp
The 'dimpling' on the visor piece? simple paint and clean up technique. Apply some paint to fill the space, let it dry, and buff off the excess with some thinner on a cotton tip or toothpick coated in thinner. The toothpick is what I used on the Visor because otherwise it would have soaked into the dimpled creases. Awesome! Glad to help! ...also I apologize in advance if they say most of their Testors Model Master acrylic is no longer in stock... to be fair I didn't buy everything they had, just one or two bottles of 15 or so colors. - Anyway, as that demonstration of painting edges shows. The GP01 is back on the desk. ...cue the music.
Just finished up the RX-78-2 Origin Ver. Oh my GOD. This is wonderful! All kinds of pretty and solid and well-articulated! Man, why’d I buy the 3.0? This rocks! ...I mean, MAN. I haven’t felt this way about a kit since the Zaku Ver. 2.0. Wow, wow, wow. This is a kit I wanna pick up and pose and have around. I love it.
I really hate trolling myself... it's really been a full YEAR since I last touched this kit. One of the reasons I took such an extended break (from a kit I got SEVEN YEARS AGO!!!) was the fact of some archaic part design issues I didn't want to contend with at the time. The cockpit and nose of the Corefighters are split halves held together at the center with molded lines going across both parts not only being misaligned but dealing with the resulting glitches on my part for missed an edge while cementing them together, and my panel lining found it, causing the line to bleed into the seam. So, I decided to scrub it, literally, from existence. 400 grit wet/dry sanded and buffed smooth to make the lines end at the curved corners. The next reason for the break, details where the kit shows its age in the lack thereof. I already began integrating photo etch plates for some of the 'stamped circle' details. I already have some of the sprocket detail types set on the shield, and planning to use them almost everywhere I feel they were necessary. Looking over the Corefighters tonight, I see these square cutouts and decided they need something too. So, I wound up going online for a set of AW-92. I got this pic from USA Gundam Store, which is where I ended up going to since it gave me an excuse to pick up a Saturnix armor at the same time. I'll keep building the Corefighters and once these parts come in, I can set all of my photo plates in one sitting.
My work schedule is changing slightly such that I should be getting every other Friday off (a variation on the "10 hour 4 day week" trend), and with that I intend to start diving into my backlog since I need to make room for all the new ones bluefin will be sending me over the rest of the year. And I intend to finally finish that goddamn Atlas Gundam. There is just so goddamn much that kit needs in paint detailing and I'm not even sure I'm gonna bother building the twin SMGs since there's absolutely no weapon storage for anything which kinda pisses me off if I'm honest given how they absolutely could have managed gun storage in the hollow booster ski binder things (the official decals which I got with the kit even have markings for the binders specifically stating that's where the guns go!). I'm also thinking about hauling out the kit that's probably been in backlog the longest, which is my HG Throne Gundam Zwei, if only for prep work. Great looking suit but a lot of it needs full on painting due to some really bad color choices (the sword is supposed to be all white but inexplicably half of it is SAND BROWN all for the stupid mid-body "locks" - this would never happen on something designed today). Additionally, I have the Bandai waterslides for the S1 00 Mobile suits which includes the Throne series so I intend on making use of those, but there are two big "GNW-002" labels and while one of them will fit on the Buster Sword nicely, the other one I'm not sure how to pull off. See, what I'd like to do is have the label go on at an angle on the leg, kind of similar to what you see here on the "Trial Version" scheme of the Physalis's left leg. The problem is that the Throne Gundam Zwei's legs are not exactly flush in terms of having a smooth leg profile. So if I applied the decal straight on, it would look deformed and weird from multiple angles, but at the same time it's not a perfect 90 degree elevation so I can't get away with cutting the decal along the edge, either. I'm wondering if I should just leave the second big "GNW-002" for a potential Action Base label instead.
Lets be fair, if you build a giant robot that could flip the bird, you absolutely would flip the bird with it.
