Wednesday, March 25, 2009

1/100 Astray Red Frame Part 4

Finishing up before the katana

As the title implied, I'm finishing up with the paint work on the main body of Astray Red Frame before concentrating on his katana.

The last two components are the waist and head.


Black for the interior of the rear skirt armor, with a little bit of red at the bottom of the part extending from the pelvis joint.


The whole part is in white, so quite a lot of painting is required to get the colors instructed.


For the rear skirt armor, I painted the red portion first using normal permanent marker (smaller one with fine tip), then black permanent marker of the same size for the area around the red part.

Finally, rock n' roll for the whiteboard marker refill ink mentioned in Part 2 for the rest of the part. ^^

The reason for using the black marker first is to paint a bit of "safe zone" so that you won't have the whiteboard marker refill ink so near the red painted part and affect it. As mentioned in Part 2, you can't really control the flow of the ink, which makes it has the potential to destroy the paint you applied before that when the two meets.


Got the small red portion covered, but quite a bit of black ink is wasted because the part in the middle is going to be hidden by the pelvis block anyway ^^;

Everything OK on the outside. ^^ Moving on to the front skirt armor.



Painted black for the interior just like the rear skirt armor. Just the middle part though, since only that would be exposed when the model is completed.


Black for the interior of the ones on the side as well. Normal black marker can be used as the part to be painted isn't too deep for the tip of the marker to reach.

The last component of the day is the head:


A bit of Gundam Marker Red for both sides of the mask.


The drain inside the red plate behind the head can't be reached by my panel-liner, so I just used the refill ink again to save myself from all the trouble. ^^


Panel-lined all the parts and then stored everything up for them to have more time to dry off.

As you can see from the image above, I painted all sides of the clear part for the eye using black normal marker, and this has pretty much become a custom for all my Gunplas.

The reason is, when you apply the foil sticker to the eye, it's usually just enough to cover the required part. When you snap the clear part onto the face, there will be a bit of clear slit between the clear part and the mask below it, which doesn't look cool at all. With the black paint, you can get everything covered, because all the foil stickers for Gundams' eyes have black surrounding. ^^

The katana is my favorite component for this model. Just seven parts for the whole weapon, including the sword and its scabbard, but they will take the most delicate paint work for this entire model. ^^; I believe I'll split up the review on that - don't think I can finish everything in one night, and I have no intention of rushing it too ^^

Also, I think I'll need to do some research so that I can correctly name the different parts of the sword in the review, with respect of a real Japanese katana. ^^

1 comment:

StarGhazzer:太空人 said...

From my experience, most of the time the eye stickers are large enough to cover the entire clear parts without any "leakage" even after assembly.

What I also do for the eye stickers after applying them is to gently press around the edges with a fingernail so that the eyes become elevated like how the clear part originally is.

Nice detailed review on the Astray... reminds me of the time I built my fragile Blue Frame.