A mixture of Gunpla, Cooking, SCUBA, Corgis, and Life

Read more about the article Christmas in Hong Kong

Christmas in Hong Kong

December 22, Nicky and Angel come by and pick up Yuki and I and take us to LAX, we have a midnight flight out to Hong Kong. I had won the spot North American representative spot for the Gunpla Builders World Cup finals to be held on Christmas day in Hong Kong. As usual, my normal small baggage loaded inside my larger, mostly empty baggage. The larger baggage is carrying goods that I’m bringing for Yuki’s parents and my god parents. In my small backpack is also a little white gold ring emblazoned with four small diamonds and a larger diamond that’s about .7 ct in size. If anything, this should be a fairly memorable trip.

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Read more about the article December’s Model Build Gathering

December’s Model Build Gathering

This past weekend was the December Model Build Gathering. We didn’t hold a gathering last month since we had the SCGMC contest. And I believe that combined with a few people that learned of our build gatherings from the SCGMC event, the December gathering was fairly large. We also had our annual white elephant exchange which is always a fun time. When we first started the white elephant exchange, I think we had a total of 8 participants and the exchange was still fun. This year we had 27 participants, and wow, such a difference in the game, but more about this and the actual build gathering after the jump.

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Read more about the article Sazabi Part Deux

Sazabi Part Deux

Yesterday, I woke up and just felt horrible. I’ve had a slight cough over the past few weeks and overnight, it just got bad. So I went to the doctor and got some nice meds. Then headed off to work to pick up my work computer so that I could finish my projects that had deadlines. I took some of the meds and started in on my office work and finished around 2:30pm or so. I was planning on just crashing after getting my work done, because while working, that’s all I could think of, crashing out. But after work was done, I took some cough medicine, a small amount so that I don’t get completely destroyed mentally. Went out and picked up some ingredients for porridge. The pizza I ate for lunch caused me to pee out of my butt, not the greatest feeling in the world, so I needed to get something less greasy. The porridge was cooking and wouldn’t be done for another 4 hours or so.

Some semblance of energy returned and while looking at my unfinished base, I decided that there were only a few more steps and I’d be done. So the last part of my sick day was spent working on gunpla. Guess that drive to finally finish the project I technically started back in January of last year kicked into gear. Below is the start of the base and the completed base.

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Read more about the article All your base are belong to us

All your base are belong to us

Since the last update, the past several days has been spent focused on the base as the Jegan is completed. The process is fairly time consuming as each step takes about a day to fully dry and cure up, if I’m lucky. Depending on the humidity, temperature and thickness of the stuff applied to the surface; the celluclay (Papier-mâché) may take anywhere from one to 5 days to completely dry. Last night, I applied the celluclay to the base and here’s a comparison of the base from the start of the build to now. The light at the end of the tunnel is much brighter now, and this is the last component of the build. Once the celluclay dries, all that is left is the painting and weathering for the base which are some very quick steps in the overall scope of the project.

Aside from the added electronics and surface details, the basic build technique I use for dioramas or bases:

  • Styrene sheets, rods, strips are used for structural details
  • A basic surface of styrofoam, wood blocks, or in this case, a resin asteroid base is used for the main surface dynamics, the basic landscape for the base
  • Plaster cloth is used to encompass everything as well as give a solid surface for the next layer
  • Celluclay is used as the final texture or covering surface over the dried plaster cloth
  • The final steps are paint, weathering, and any sort of ground works such as grass, sand, dirt, rocks, etc.

On to the build progression for this project’s base.

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