Back from Guayaquil = slow progress on Sniper

Work has me on travel a bit, and last week, I was in Ecuador, Guayaquil specifically. I did make a quick picture post of the skirts right after getting 90% of it painted up just as a quick teaser and to keep my motivation going. But I didn’t really go into details about the process. So let us backup a little bit to before I even started throwing colors onto the kit and it was still being primed and sanded. The paint scheme I mentally pictured required a little bit of testing before I jumped right into spraying the parts and masking. In the past, not doing the proper color tests and just trying things have bitten me pretty hard on the ass. I mixed up several batches of colors and got to work on spoon testing.

When I was in Hong Kong in March; I picked up some metal templates; a square and a hex. Each template has 4 sizes, the largest on one side, then the other side is split into three sizes. The template is pretty nice for cutting exact size squares or hexs. Tape is just placed on the template, then I used a toothpick to run along the edges to press down the tape, and finally, run a brand new hobby knife blade along the pressed in grooves and I have my cut squares. A test spoon is painted with the first layer of color then the masking and paint scheme tests begin.

Fast forward the different levels of masking and I was satisfied enough with the results that I could proceed. The spoon test also showed me that I needed to change the masking technique slightly. But the important part of color matching worked, so progress continues on the actual kit after the jump.

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TGG invades the IPMS Seattle Spring Show

As Angel mentioned on our FB page, this is the 2nd spot in our “TGG Tour”. A few weeks ago, a group of us went up to NorCal to hit up Tatsu Hobby’s spring contest the Blue and Yellow Ball. This past weekend, along with new Washington State TGG Transplant Mike Wine; Angel and I went up and competed in this VERY large show. I believe this was the first year of an official “Gundam” sub category within the Sci-Fi umbrella. And within Gundam, this was further split into 3 categories – 1/100 and larger, 1/144 and smaller, and Out of Box which required instruction manuals. And due to the overwhelming number of gunpla entries, I believe they further split the categories into modded and non modded. It was very cool to meet some folks from r/Gunpla as well as folks from Washington State Gunpla, The Sleeves – Oregon Gunpla Community, and some folks from Vanpla that made the early border run from Vancouver. This was a very impressive showing not just in numbers; but the quality of the builds. There are some VERY talented modelers up here. Hopefully some of these guys will come down to SCGMC and show some of us what’s what. I had a great time meeting and chatting with people while whoring out our Kampfer/Shiki/Wing Build shirts. I didn’t get a chance to talk with everyone, but I did get to chat with a good number of folks. So hopefully I’ll be able to come up for a future show. I gotta work on my damn skills first so that I can actually be competitive! These are some great people!

I hope to have gotten pictures of every kit that was on display. I apologize if I missed one, but there was just so many kits. Enjoy the pictures after the jump!

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GM Sniper 2 Update: throwing some paint and starting work on the base

It’s been awhile since I last updated on this project. We got new Kampfer shirts in, so the last update was used to promote that. Somewhere in the middle of this post there will be some shameless plugging for our new Kampfer shirts as well as our reprinted Shiki shirts. But enough of that; on with the update. Starting off, I felt that the red bit for the crotch needed a slight bit of detail so I took the scriber and cut some plastic on the sides. It’s relatively simple plastic removal but does a decent job of adding some detail.

Returning to the rear skirts; in the last update, I had just started putting together a scratch built knife and was creating a sheath for it. I trimmed down that plastic piece from the GM Spartan conversion kit and sanded it down to fit into the existing spot on the rear skirt. I also had to sand down some of the internal area for the rear skirt piece for the damn thing to fit. Once the piece fit; I drilled into the plastic and glued a magnet into place. I drilled a corresponding spot on the knife’s guard and added a magnet there. Now the knife is actually held by the power of the magnet instead of friction or just gluing it into place. I wanted the knife functional. A little priming shows areas to fix.

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