I skipped my WIP photo-taking towards the end and went right away to finishing up the kit. It’s been a long time since I’ve touched a kit smaller than an MG so in terms of motivation it was easier to get off my lazy butt and work on it as there were far fewer parts. The masking is a little more difficult than usual so some areas were hand painted instead ending in horrible results. Luckily due to the design of the kit they are in less commonly seen areas.
Realised it would be far less stressful if I actually did my airbrushing in a spray booth instead of spraying out the window so I sat down and constructed my booth. This time round without a laptop I have very little desk space so the booth is right behind me. Cramped conditions aside, I didn’t really take very detailed pictures as I painted the kit.
Started off by shading the white parts. I like a subtle shade but I can never get it right and it’s always barely visible to the naked eye.
I used red to shadow the orange parts. Still barely visible, but probably slightly better than the white parts.
Some of the parts are masked in preparation for more colours. The shield is quite troublesome as the biggest part has four colours. Here I have masked the orange areas and for the other shield part on the lower right I have masked out the red area. The V-shaped piece is for the chest.
The dark blue parts are freshly painted in this picture.
More masking for the shield. The orange, blue and white areas have been masked and now it’s time to paint the remaining area blue-gray. The same goes for the shoulder parts.
Since the instruction manual does not provide any colour or painting guide I have to literally refer to the box images as the manual itself does not show every single area of the kit. Here I just found out the back needs a little extra colour. In my haste to see the completed result I assembled the shield and halberd before I could do any shading on the blue-gray areas. I’ll see whether I can use smoke gray instead since it’s impossible to disassemble them now.
The final colour to be painted is the dark gray inner frame colour. I’ve done some masking for the feet and hands.
There are some small areas that I decided to hand paint because I was lazy to do really intricate masking, resulting in the sloppy results above. The hands had to be hand painted as my masking was just horrible. I was using the same jar of colour mix to hand paint the hands but for some strange reason I could not get it to be the exact same shade despite stirring for minutes, so the hands now look as if they have slightly different coloured hand armour.
The next step would be to top coat everything and prepare to paint the black areas/panel lines with a wash. I foresee a problem with the lower legs as some of the lines do not have clear recesses.
I got this guy some time ago when I was craving to build something and finished snapping it together fairly quickly. I also wrote a post on the board game that was printed on the inside of the box but never did a proper review as I planned to paint it.
Don’t mind the crap quality – I used my phone to take the pictures at night just before tearing it down for priming.
The kit was actually primed at the same time as my MG Astray, but I never had the time to finish painting this one after the Astray.
Thanks to Bandai continuously blurring the line between toy and model kit, I never did a review of this guy. It’s somewhat like a mix between an SD and a HG kit. You get SD levels of colour separation ie. there is a fair bit of painting and masking to do, while you also get around HG levels of articulation. The joints are simple and give just enough articulation to manage some poses. On the runners, parts are designed to be removable by twisting them off so there is no space between the runner and the part. This design tends to leave tiny holes on the parts instead of nubs.
I didn’t fill in any of the holes on the undersides of the shield, feet or skirt pieces. I also did a half-assed job at trying to remove the seam lines as I haven’t bought any Tamiya putty to replaced my dried up tube. There’s going to be a lot of masking required, especially for the shield.
The last 2 exams of my uni life will be on this coming Monday and Tuesday. With that said I mostly stopped caring about them already and haven’t really studied much this past week now that our hellish design project is finally over. It’s not helping when you see other people going for all sorts of outings this week. I myself joined a simple celebration so yay I’m not some lonely sociopath or something. I had this entry languishing in my drafts folder since my previous post on them, so I thought it would be a good time to post it today. After Tuesday I will finally be free of academic burden except for the uncertainty of receiving results and whether this horrible semester might cost me an Honours tier.
When it comes to statues I guess once you step past a certain line you can’t go back…
Left this picture as it is as I can’t show the packages out of their bubble wraps. I got them from an online shop called Jungle which, like Amiami’s early pre-owned items, had ambiguous ratings for item conditions. Succubus Silvia was quite expensive but had a clear base with an area all scratched and roughed up as though the previous owner used it as a coaster or hockey puck… For the other figure, I ordered a figure which had a similar name but was a totally different figure. They agreed to refund if I took the expense to ship it back to them, but this is supposedly quite rare and was going for higher prices than what I paid for so I kept it. Not going to buy from them again anyway, they never replied my emails asking for clarification until I took it to Paypal and opened a dispute.
This is another fairly old figure which I’ve wanted. I’ve never watched the show but I liked her design and jumped on it as it was unopened and going for cheap. It seems a lot of my PVC collection comes from shows I have never watched. 
Finally, a figure which I preordered. With the not-too-recent quality control fiasco surrounding GSC I peeked through the package window to see dark patches on her legs. I found out it was due to the mold release oils showing up when the blister presses against the figure. Right now it’s still not opened and I’m not sure if I want to open it. It cost a bomb and no one seems to want to buy it now.
Got this from a local shop. It’s a prize figure so it’s really cheap if you buy it online. The shop I went to was known for selling things at higher prices, but it still sounded reasonable to me. Pretended the extra was for shipping charges or something. It’s quite well-made for such a low price. She also seems to be around 1/8 scale and ironically has a box sturdier than many other statue boxes despite requiring some assembly.
I think it’s safe to say I’ve gone off the deep end when I buy my first Native figure. Again, I didn’t preorder it and got it off Mandarake for a slight mark up not too long after it was released. It’s another one of those NSFW figures, and like many other Native figures the price seems to keep rising. Currently Native has their “Gamer Girl” figure up for order. I’m really tempted to order but it will be released when I’m scheduled to fly to Japan so it’s kinda preventing me from actually ordering.
I ordered this some time ago as retail therapy. It was supposedly stained but I didn’t care as it was hard to come by and I just paid for it. It took a particularly long time to arrive but it looks quite okay from what I can tell.
As of this post I already have 17 figures, out of which only 4 were preordered and most of them second hand. I’ve slowed down on buying the other types of figures so you might see more statue posts in future. I don’t have mad photography skills though so I don’t think I’ll be doing reviews for them.
This is it. After so long trying to get a Bandai Renewal-level Macross toy I finally managed to lay my hands on this baby, and it’s also my first DX Chogokin toy. Putting the Bandai slamming aside, this is the first Renewal-level Macross toy from Bandai which is a great improvement over the original VF-25 series of toys. I heard that a lot of engineering on the YF-29 carried over to the Renewal VF-25 series, but having never touched one of them before I’m not sure if the latter have any more updates themselves.
Those of you who have played lots of games might get the reference in the title.
After the pre-order drama last week, I was reading forums and came across some information that some shops were having a sale for some Bandai Macross toys. Despite it being a “sale” prices were still marked up above retail but were much more reasonable compared to the scalper prices I saw locally or online. I jumped on it and bought one seeing that it could be my only chance at owning a Bandai Macross toy without paying out my ass.
I’m not sure if I can put out a review for it next week as I’m really busy. Officially I have one week of school left but there’s still so much to do… My final semester is the worst semester ever.
At the time of writing this it was possible to put in an order for the VF-25F but I decided against it – Damn you Murphy’s Law! Would have ordered if not for the fact that I just bought this and have a bunch of PVC pre-orders around July. Hopefully the same can happen for the 25S or else it would remain an orange level item…
I finally witnessed firsthand the 5 second preorder windows associated with Bandai’s Macross toys. With a 5 second auto-refresh/check for change on my browser I was alerted to this:
Hit the add to cart button and the site ground to a halt.
After several frantic refreshes and attempts to log in, I kept facing the Service Temporarily Unavailable page.
A few moments later, it was sold out. Repeat this for a bunch of other online retailers. I also have no idea which local shops are accepting orders – those I’ve asked said they stopped taking orders altogether because Bandai never provides them enough stock.
I could get all butthurt and post a long tirade about Bandai’s shenanigans but this quote from a certain Macross themed forum sums it up best:
More like we’re all sperm and amiami’s the egg. Guess how many gets through.
If Bandai doesn’t want to earn all the unearned revenue and leaves it to the profiteers on the second hand market, there’s not much we can do about it.
