It feels damn good be be so organized and prepared for this year’s SCGMC event. We spent a little more money than we did last year, but it is definitely money well spent on items that will see future use at many more SCGMC events to come. We’ve been generating some good publicity through the TGG Facebook page; posting up some last minute progress pictures of kits we’ve been working on, posting up pictures of an early collection of raffle prizes, and within the past several hours, posting up pictures of our trophies we have for this year.
Time to post up some of those pictures here too, check it out after the jump!
First up are a collection of raffle prizes we had lying around at the house. There are several more prizes to add to this lot, but hopefully this gets people excited, I know that the FB post drew quite some attention, too bad I couldn’t get an early shot of all the raffle items. We’ll just have to settle for a picture taken from the show.
This year we created a new category, the Expert, and this basically is a single entry from any modeler that they deem is their best work, and it’s a head to head battle among all who feel they’ve got the skills to compete at this level. We generally like to invite folks that have won a Best of Show at any model contest, or previous SCGMC, as well as anyone who feels their modeling skills good enough. It sort of pulls these entries away from the general competition, and sort of levels the playing field. At least, this is our attempt at doing something like this. We don’t want to scare off modelers who are new to competitions, but encourage them, grow them, get them to the level of some of the expert modelers out there. So along with this category, we’ve created a plaque that for every Expert level winner each year at SCGMC, we’ll add their name to this plaque and they’ll forever be immortalized to the SCGMC and TGG world. I have hopes that I will one day make the grade. It’s great to see such great builders competing, I always get inspired to become better when I see someone’s work that just blows my mind. Below is a picture of this plaque.
This plaque will stay with TGG, and a new name added each year. But for the other awards, they will go to the rightful homes with the skilled modelers that win the awards. Along with the usual challenge coins for first, second, and third, we have the Best of Show, and Best Wing(this year’s theme award). And last but not least, we have our Expert’s Award. We wanted to have some fun with this, and we figured the expert level modelers would get a nice little kick out of this award, because it’s very tongue in cheek. We don’t want to over shadow the Best of Show, but also recognize the winner of the Expert category. A horribly painted HGUC Nu in sparkly gold, that is just snapped with nubs and no sanding, posed in the William Dafoe platoon ecstasy of death scene. The little caption at the bottom sums it all up as a nice sarcastic pat on the back. So the awards:
So far, I’ve not missed building something for the current year’s theme. I almost missed it this year by just getting lazy and losing interest, but somehow, after hitting up IPMSOC’s OrangeCon, the motivation to build rekindled, and I pushed out the project fairly quickly. Not much in terms of a traditional progress and it was more done in speed, but I did snap a few shots here and there. Below, I used some styrene glue and a toothbrush to create a rough weathered surface on the bare plastic. Once the roughed up plastic dried over night, I went and roughly sanded the plastic burrs leaving a cast iron looking effect on the surface.
The kit was then painted using some preshading effects. Metallics were used for the internals, and I went with copper for the little missile heads.
Done with the painting, I clear coated the entire kit and a few days of drying, I got the decals done – which took quite a few hours. I didn’t like the stickers that came with the Heavy Arms, so I used the bandai water slide set for the MG Wing Gundam, the decals were small enough that I didn’t think would really matter at the end of the day. Plus, I was going to weather the decals anyways.
With the decals done, they were left to sit over a few nights. Late last week, I found some time and did the paint chipping. I used the roughed up areas with some drybrushing to create more paint chipping around those areas, trying to create an effect of the paint cracking around the weathered surface. Rush job, so I wasn’t really paying too much attention, so its a bit over weathered. With the paint chipping done, I didn’t feel the need for a wash/filter, so I just went straight to the flat coat. With the flat coat dry, I applied some pastel weathering for rust marks, burned metal areas, and dust. Then I went and painted the gun. I had done the same glue surface trick with the gun parts (except the ammo belt) but I just left the gun and ammo drum alone. Maybe I’ll weather it to match the suit at a later date, but since it’s not competing, I really don’t care. It’s just built to help support the Wing theme. And it effectively is my very first Wing kit of any kinda. Not that I’m against the backstreet boys Gundam team, I just never got around to building Nick Carter… (BTW< I had to Wiki BSB to find a name to use). Regardless, here's the finished kit.
See you guys at SCGMC Saturday!
