Monthly Model Build Gatherings

The first gunpla build gathering hosted by the collective that would later be known as ThoseGundamGuys, had fairly humble beginnings starting July 21, 2007. It was born from comments and discussions after panels at Anime Expo as well as from several gunpla hobby forums. The basic idea was to gather the local gunpla builders to create a community focused on learning gunpla building skills.

I had known that there was a decent number of gunpla builders in Southern California just based off attending local IPMS shows, Anime Expo, and online discussions with members of various hobby forums. I had learned most of my building techniques from reading and stumbling through some good and plenty of bad experiments. Attempts to add to the collection of English based online references for building worked well, but it didn’t completely satisfy my lofty goals. So these monthly model build gatherings started. I believe our first one was 4-6 of us, some meeting for the first time, other’s I had known previously from local model contests and from AX.

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7/21/2013 Child of Mecha and Those Gundam Guys

My first real community for Gunpla building was a forum on the Child of Mecha site. This was where I learned most of my basic techniques from better seamlines, weathering, color layering, and modifications. It is also from this site that I met a great number of gunpla builders such as Bhop (Brandon), Tim, Gouf (Duncan), Khyron (Jim), Tetsujin (George), MarkW, J.E.D (James Doyle), and countless online personalities. The site sorta stemmed from the old Gundam.com foum as the serious gunpla builders wanted to separate themselves from the sea of snappers. A community of serious builders. It is here that I learned to accept criticism on my own works.

opening

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Anime Expo 2013 and a little homage to 24 year old box art

Anime Expo was this past weekend, and I think this was the least amount of time I’ve spent at the event, I only went for two days and didn’t spend too much time hitting video rooms or panels. This year, I was given two panels, one that was G-rated and one that was 18+. Apparently, last year it didn’t make it on the schedule and a number of people thought I wasn’t there. The GBWC event this year was quite impressive, a lot of new players that with a little help, will become some serious contenders. The second part of this post is to show off my recently completed Nu Gundam diorama, but then again, since it was at AX, pictures of it have already been posted. Regardless, this project was pretty different from any of my previous works. I was trying to get a close reproduction of the original 1/100 Nu Gundam box art, so pastels and hand painting was employed, it’s a little out there of a project, but I’m damn proud of it. Here are some pictures of the completed project I took the day before AX.

More about the project and thoughts on this year’s AX after the jump.

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Anime Expo 2013 Tomorrow!

Yes, it is that time of year again, summer’s begun only a few weeks ago, stands selling nerfed sticks and tubes that explode when mixed with fire; it’s coming up on July 4th, and in Los Angeles, it’s Anime Expo season – at least for the next four days. My involvement with the convention has dropped considerably. I go to say hi to friends, check out a few new animes, and to enter the regional Gunpla Builders World Cup competition for North America. More information can be found here: GBWC 2013 @ Anime Expo or the distributor’s page with information about all the regional competition locations: North American GWBC 2013

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