GM Sniper 2

Read more about the article GM Sniper Project: The display base

GM Sniper Project: The display base

This last bit of work has been ongoing since I finished the Sniper. This is the display base. I got the idea to do an relief style display when I was up at Tatsu Hobby’s Blue and Yellow Ball event a few months back. I saw a display that had half a figure projecting out of a wall piece and thought that would be a really cool effect to try with a kit. So I want to start small first, then possibly do something bigger in the future. A more wall mount piece in the future, but here we go. I had been working on the Zaku bit for a while and only touched a little on the wood base in a previous update. I have some electronics involved here too. Previously, I had a ring light attached at the bottom of the box with some angled styrene sides. Aside from that, I also have the electronics that will drive the mono eye. I’m using some tinyduino boards to power and run the mono eye.

Here is a quick video of ths base.

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Read more about the article Master Grade GM Sniper 2 Modifications List

Master Grade GM Sniper 2 Modifications List

I got to thinking about the kit and the mods I made for the thing and never really got around to listing them out. It is not only for the competitions that I plan on attending; but a visual reference to how much really changed on the kit from the stock photos Bandai and others have put out to the dizzying camoed painted completed version I have now. I also realized that when I snapped “final” pictures the other day, I left some sticky tack on the lower area of the GM’s slide down visor. So I took some new pictures with some slightly altered lighting to fix the rather harsh looking light against the kit.

Using stock photos, here’s the direct comparisons:

The list of mods after the jump:

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Read more about the article GM Sniper 2 Principal Painting is DONE!

GM Sniper 2 Principal Painting is DONE!

Its been two weeks since the last update post. There were a few busy weekends where not much progressed and all the work in these past two weeks was just the endless cycle of paint-mask-paint-mask. So this will just show you how f-ing tedious that process was and hopefully show that it’s actually worth the grinding. The last bit of work done last night was spraying the clear gloss over the kit. Several coats of clear gloss. And the reason for this will become more apparent as we progress through this update. Before taking the kit apart into small subsections for the clear gloss, I snapped a few assembled pictures. It’s a good time to bring back the snapped pictures I took over 3 months ago when I first started this project to get a side by side comparison.

Frontside:

Backside:

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Read more about the article Back from Guayaquil = slow progress on Sniper

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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