Weekend update. A good amount of work was accomplished on Kanu over the weekend, some rework to resculpt a broken/missing piece, and a build gathering capped out the events of the long Labor Day weekend. Because of the amount of hard alcohol consumed, I spent the day recovering. I’m still not 100%, but at least I’m no longer orally evacuating last night’s liquid consumption.
With the clear gloss cured for a full day, I can now apply the decal. The first picture shows the planning stage. Once I have a good idea on where I want the tattoo (decal) placed, I can now dip the decal in some water for a few seconds then take the decal out of the water and let it sit on a napkin for a minute or so. This loosens up the decal from the paper backing and doesn’t completely dissolve the glue that’s on the decal film. When I went to slide the decal onto the skin, the decal fell apart, several decals fell apart… so I took my gloss clear and sprayed the decal sheet and let that set up for a couple of minutes. Once that completely dried, I tried the attempt again, and the clear gloss added some strength to the rather thin decal film. The bad part about this is that the clear gloss added a little thickness to the decal film.
Again, as I’ve been progressing through the HGUC Nu Gundam builds, I’ve been taking a good number of videos of various process that may or may not be intuitive to newer modelers. I’ve already gotten a few requests for videos of certain techniques, and I hope to get more. What may come as second nature to me may not be as intuitive to others, so I need the feed back to know what else I should focus the camera. Additionally, I’m trying to get it so that the videos are focused on the actual process, so hopefully, my video taking skills are getting better.
The first thing for this update is that I added a masking Tutorial to the pack. For now it focuses on masking gunpla, I will update it soon when I some masking work on a figure kit. Click here for the masking tutorial.
More updates below. (more…)