Farewell United Kingdom - Hello Gundam Plastics!

So here is my first post in 2018, and a lot has happened! I passed my PhD defence and am now officially Dr.Tom. I am also back in Canada and looking for work.

The last six months of my time in the UK were spent in the Welsh countryside with family. It was a lovely way to say goodbye, and it feels very much as though I've left some pieces of myself in the water and hills of England/Wales.

Coast of Pembrokeshire, Wales.

Rock formation near my family's house. With cousin to boot!

My hobby during these six months was necessarily rather light as I was in the process of selling off a lot of excess and unpainted miniatures and hobby supplies. Most notably I had to part with my airbrush compressor and the 40k Orks that I hadn't started painting. But I've managed to keep all the figures I've painted and some of my best tools/paints so I'm looking forward to eventually establishing a small-scale hobby setup once I'm settled here in Canada.

However this did get me to do some thinking about what I could see myself doing with the hobby in the future. I decided I wanted to undertake something a bit more oriented towards individual projects rather than large-scale armies. To that end I started to look at busts and larger models without any sort of tabletop usage that would force me to approach them as a properly focused hobby project.

Eventually I remembered reading about Gunpla (short for "Gundam Plastics") and took a dive into researching it online. These are plastic figures depicting large bipedal combat suits at various scales. They originally started in the early 90's and were made by the Japanese company Bandai to tie-in with the Gundam anime series it produced. Since then it's become a huge industry and Bandai remains the largest producer of Gunpla figures. Good quick overviews of what Gunpla kits are can be found here and here

I eventually decided to dip my toe in the water and ordered a kit to see how I like it. I went with one produced by Kotobukiya, which is Bandai's biggest competition. Unlike Bandai, Kotobukiya has no anime series to accompany their figures, but this means they have some really cool original designs that look a lot more modern than the classic Gundam stuff.

The kit I went is called the "Ji-Dao". It's part of Kotobukiya's "Frame Arm" series of figures, which all come with a pre-built inner frame that you essentially add the armour components on top of. One thing to note is that Gunpla figures are all articulated, meaning you can move all the joints and pose them. Given that I had never built an articulated model kit before the apparent simplicity of the frame arms line appealed to me.

Promo shot of the Ji-Dao.

An example of the way you can pose it.

I'll go into detail profiling my experiences building the Ji-Dao, and more generally my pros/cons impressions of Gunpla at a later date. But as a quick bullet point summary this was my first time attempting the following:

• Building an articulated kit.
• Painting in components and then assembling a figure.
• Using Tamiya paints.

The components after a test assembly before I started painting.

I decided to give my airbrush one last hurrah before selling it off by trying to paint the kit. I went with the method typically used by Gunpla builders which is to paint the individual components and then assemble it. I don't doubt my process of doing so was rather sloppy but I learnt a lot! My colour scheme adhered pretty much exactly to the original scheme for the sake of simplicity. This was more about giving the build a try than trying to get super creative.

Undercoating the components before painting them.

Unfortunately I wasn't able to finish the build before I had to pack everything up and leave for home, but I did manage to get all of the base painting done with the airbrush before selling it, as well as doing some sponge weathering on the components.

I re-assembled the kit and packed it up, but took some pictures before I did:

Current state of the Ji-Dao.

Rearview

Natural Light!

It still needs to be panel-lined, which is where you trace the grooves in armour plating to help visually separate the components. Additionally I'd like to do some dirt streaking using some oil paints or weathering effects to make it look properly dirty and not just chipped. I really think these two elements will tie the kit together nicely.

Overall i'm pleased with the result of the test build but I confess I had some issues during painting that might discourage me from attempting it again until I have a proper setup in Canada. However the assembly was a blast so maybe i'll stick to unpainted Gunpla figures for the foreseeable future. I've been watching some of the anime series so I'm quite excited to try my hand with a Bandai kit!

Thanks for reading and look forward to more updates soon!