I was inspired by this image posted by @GAUGE in the MP appreciation thread, and seeing as the world has stopped turning I decided to give recreating it a go: I'm leaning more towards a G1 look instead of the G2 logo, but still the comic colours: Using the following colours: Tamiya TS-37 Lavender Tamiya TS-45 Pearl White Tamiya TS-16 Yellow Tamiya X-6 Orange So far I've completed the legs and one arm as they're the easiest to disassemble,only 4 screws in each leg and 3 in the waist: I'm going to get started on the main torso soon but it's almost entirely held together by pin joints and I'm completely useless at removing those, so it'll be a slow process of masking off areas and doing it bit by bit One area I'm currently unsure how to approach is the chest flames. I'm leaning towards stripping the existing paint off so I can repaint it lavender, then redo the flames. Only problem is I have no idea how I would accurately redo the flames. The alternative is to somehow keep the existing flames and just spray all the surrounding orange into lavender, but that would be extremely finicky to do. Has anyone got any recommendations? Maybe there's a good decal or template out there for me to use?
Reprolabels makes a set for this figure with chest flames, you would just have to cut off the orange around the flames. Awesome job so far!
Thanks people! Now that we're effectively in lockdown here I'll hopefully get this and my other repaint project done sooner. Thanks. I'm going to keep that as an option if I can't find a sticker/decal that's the same pattern as the existing flames. I'm also considering just buying a sheet of yellow vinyl paper and cut out the flames myself. I'll leave that til I've painted everything for now though.
Soo... After a period of procrastination I figured it's time for an update on this. I'm mainly finished on the painting side of things, just need to polish a few rough areas and paint a few details like the head crest. I've put him together without screws so I could take a picture and get an idea how he'll look when finished minus the chest flames: (the specs on him are mainly dust) I had a 'mare with the spoiler, I could've just left it as is but, being insane I wanted a brighter yellow than the MP28 yellow, and no orange in the middle bit. So I painted it with Tamiya yellow and it looked good at first but after a while something went wrong whilst curing and it ended up SUPER orange peeley. It didn't look like that after the first few hours of drying, so I don't know what caused it, maybe a reaction with the plastic, or something got spilt when I wasn't looking, or I'd just gone too thick with the paint. Either way I had to sand it back and redo to a reasonably acceptable level: He'll still be able to transform, but this figure was clearly never designed to be painted in certain areas, particularly the collar, thighs, knees, and shoulder armatures. I can see why Takara left those areas unpainted on MP28/40. I'm not sure how the upper legs will hold up to repeat transformation without lots of paint chipping/ scraping when they collapse into the lower legs. Here's the alt mode (without hood flames) with the legs removed to avoid worrying about the paint for now: Last thing to do is the chest flames which I've been pondering over for a while. I've decided I'm going to try yellow vinyl that I'll cut to shape myself. Possibly the most chance of it looking amateur but I just couldn't find a decal to match the normal chest flame pattern. Will update with that once the vinyl paper arrives.
Draw half of the flame, fold it and cut it out. This way you can make a template to trace on the vinyl that's symmetrical
Suggestion: Should you decide to go the Reprolabels route, contact them, tell them what you are doing and what you need. Sometimes they can do custom work off their existing designs for a reasonable price.
