After School Tea Time

Met the postwoman on my out to lunch today and saw her holding this box. It turned out to be mine indeed and she gave me a mission to test my Photoshop skills. I’m starting to like SAL because it’s cheap and arrives in the quickest time promised.

Add Detail to Your Kits Using Rivets

This one’s long overdue. I’m just going to go through how I added the rivets onto my Zaku. It’s a great way to detail a kit, but getting the right parts may be difficult for some.

MG 1/100 MS-06J Zaku II Ver.2.0 (Final Write-up)

I’ve received a few comments asking me how I did this or that on my Zaku which made me realise I forgot to write my work process, colour scheme and comments when I completed it. Apologies for missing out some of your comments and sorry for the inconsistency. I guess going cold for a few months then becoming all excited over the completion of a kit made me forget.

Aftermarket Thrusters

Since I wrote how I did the shiny pistons on my Zaku previously, I might as well write more how-to’s. This time it’s how I replaced the stock verniers with aftermarket aluminum thrusters on the Zaku’s backpack for more detail.

Life with Braces 5: I can whistle again

I’ve not been writing about these things because the past few appointments have merely been a case of changing the arch wires to different ones every time.

Yesterday though, I finally had the bridge thing under the roof of my mouth removed. That thing has been inconveniencing me in several ways, especially cutting into my tongue. The imprint was pretty deep on one side of my tongue and the surrounding area got white and sore. No idea why the sore area was white. Besides that, it affected my speech a little and reduced my eating speed. I couldn’t stuff myself with food because it would bump into the thing, or get wedged between it and the roof of my mouth so I had to eat small portions at a time. I am already a slow eater so that thing made me eat even slower. Oh, and it was also nearly impossible for me to whistle (LOL)

On the other hand, the dentist put in a spring-like thing on the right side of my upper jaw. I’m having a constant, slight pain there right now.

Real-looking Hydraulics

Thought it’d be nice to share how I pulled off the smooth shine on the hydraulic pistons of my MG Zaku II, so this is my first how-to guide here. Too bad I didn’t spam enough pictures of the leg area despite loving how it turned out.

MG 1/100 MS-06J Zaku II Ver.2.0 (3)

Final part of my Zaku II photo shoot.
Part 1 – Inner frame
Part 2 – Static pose

MG 1/100 MS-06J Zaku II Ver.2.0 (2)

This time round, I altered the orientation of my background and the LED light strips. I dare say the result is a little better than when I was photographing the inner frame. I think I’ll put up a picture of my “light box” just for kicks.

MG 1/100 MS-06J Zaku II Ver.2.0 (1) – Inner Frame

Finally finished dirtying the kit and adding the rivets in the evening, set up my Ikea Dioder “light box” underneath my desk and busted out my trusty but pretty lousy point-and-shoot camera when I looked at the empty battery indicator. Thankfully I already took photos of the inner frame yesterday, so I went to write this post as the battery charged. Looks like I’ll have to wait a few hours before resuming.

Closing in to the Final Stretch

On Sunday this package arrived in the mail. I squealed like a little girl and quickly went on to plaster the Zaku with decals.

An A4-sized cardboard packet to hold this small sheet.

After roughly 8 hours spread over 2 days and 126 decals, I sprayed Mr. Super Clear Flat and battled severe frosting due to the damp weather. Luckily things could be recovered with more layers proven by Chubbybots with his HGUC GP02A. On some parts, I actually had to re-spray 3 times to finally avoid any frosting. Maybe I should go dig up my old kits and spray them again to get rid of the frost.

The final stretch would be to dirty the kit. I took some photos of the inner frame last night but my lousy lamp crumbled when I started to use it. It was made of really crappy plastic. In the end I set up the paper background underneath my desk and used these:

This was a Christmas present from my mum. I never really got around to permanently using it somewhere and used blu-tack to stick these under my desk to provide some light. I also realised how bad the macro mode on my point-and-shoot camera was. Looks like I’ll need to do some major cropping.

If all goes well, you might see a few more posts within the same day.