PG Strike Freedom WIP

    Back to Gundam business, here's a WIP build that's been a long time coming. I was showing these pics that have been stored in my camera to our friends in the Philippines, when I realised that I should have posted them! This is for a display piece for a year-end Gundam event. I don't even know when it's due, but I'm more or less done with the main mecha. The objective is to detail it up like Jap maestro Keita's MG SF. A special mention goes to Toymaker, who gave me a lot of advice and some demos for this. So here goes:

Monkey business in the philippines

    Okay so I wanted to do this after I come back from the Philippines, but it's the final night of our trip and I'm unable to get to sleep (thanks to a symphony of snores), so here I am blogging away while my fellow Poison Monkeys Toymaker, Izakku81 and Edmund of Hobbymate are conked out like logs on the floor of our hotel room beside me.

What's that you say? On the floor? Of a hotel room? Four air-brush wielding tough guys bunking together in one room when we have two??? Yep. That's a story for another day!

For now though lets pay tribute first and foremost to our wonderful Filipino hosts:

The story of trinity

    

    While I'm working on the Exia to a stage where I'll have blog-worthy stuff to post, here's a little story I made up last year to complement an awesome Bakuc entry by Toymaker and some friends. Their build was Trinity. I'm sure it needs no introduction. This was the world champ for the Group cat last year. Comprising three highly modified MG Sinanjus, I thought a side-story was in order so I wrote something for them. And since I now have a blog, I might as well re-publish it here. So here's the updated edition of the Trinity saga. It won't win any Pulitzer prize, but I hope it's entertaining enough....Enjoy!

BACK ON TRACK/ WIP PEEKS

    Finally my Mac is back up and running again. But I've lost most of the data so I've gotta reinstall everything. Gaaaah. Looking forward, I've painted the darker parts of my Shadow Scheme Exia. Here's an armour piece to stare at. Lol. I'm quite satisfied with how the dark grey-black turned out, as that's the initial idea. I added some subtle post-shading that you can spot if you look reeeeeeally closely.

DMK Bumblebee

Exia apart, here are a coupla peeks at some other WIPs I've held off for the moment. I'm actually working on the DMK Bumblebee and am almost done with the fella before I stalled in place of other more urgent projects. While I haven't taken pics of Bee's yellow bling armour, here are some inrernals, dry-brushed and detailed up with enamels to check out.

Pussy pics and a rotten Apple

    You know how they say Apple, unlike the PC, does not break down? Well, guess what? It fookin' DOES, dammit! My Mac crashed yesterday and it's only two years old. It's sitting somewhere in the service room of the repair-shop right now but they tell me it's fixed and ready for collection, so I'll pick it up tomorrow and hopefully I can start blogging properly again as I'm using a really tiny, really slow Netbook currently...

On the gundam front, I've primed all the Exia armour, but there ain't much to show, unless you wanna see grey bits sitting on sticks. I'll post a second update once I'm done with the colouring. Meanwhile, lets just wait for the Mac to come home, and while we're at it, here're are some pics of my cat (actually she's my girlfriend's) who keeps me company late nights when I'm up fiddling with plastic.

Exia (Shadow scheme.) Commish WIP 1

   
    Finally lets get down to real business again - GUNDAM!! Remember that commish Exia I mentioned previously? Well it's finally sanded down and ready for priming. I haven't really figured out the exact tone and shades for the armour yet as my client just wanted something in grey. He wanted to model the colours after American resin modeller mtomczek's Strike:

Singapore Toy Game and Comic Convention

The queue at 930am in the morning of STGCC. Comprised mainly of over 500 eager beavers hoping to get their hands on some limited edition Hot Toys products. 

    Alright fellas, it's the weekend and I've got a free pass to the 2011 STGCC at Suntec so I went to check it out. There were some pretty impressive displays by Hongkong toy brand Hot Toys. It's definitely an eye-opener. In fact I've got so many pics I don't now which ones to post! Lol.

Coming soon...

Thanks to a friend who bought the kit, I had my first scrutiny of the latest MG - the Delta Plus - that came out only this week, and I must say it's a nifty-looking mutha! I'm definitely getting one of these babies. Maybe two...Heh. The head design is pretty detailed, and its entire form is sleek shit, to say the least. Definitely one of the better cannon fodder type kits to come out of the Gundam pantheon.

Of Monkeys and a Captain...

    Between now and the next Gundam post, here're just some of my thoughts on recent sci-fi/ superhero movies out in cinemas. I caught Rise of the Planet of the Apes yesterday and I must say it's pretty decent. I never followed the Planet of the Ape series, cos I always thought a bunch of monkeys talking and moseyin' around like real folks just looks and sounds stupid. lol. But this one; this one's different. It's supposed to be the prequel to the series, explaining how apes came to rule the earth. And the way they animated the character's expression - in this case, Caeser, a super-intelligent chimp - outshone even human actors James Franco and Freida Pinto! Somebody give this monkey an Oscar. :P

Resin RX-78

Since I sacrificed an MG RX for Optimus Prime, I've gotta make it up to the RX, dontcha think? :P So here's a little something to share with you guys - a resin RX Ver Ka. 1/100 conversion, using the inner frame of the  MG RX 2.0 (Yes, I sacrificed another RX! These guys are becoming conversion fodder!!).

The top-left side of chest right next to the yellow collar guard was badly damaged out of the box, and many hours of putty work and sanding were required to repair it and replicate the look on the right side. If you can't spot any difference, then I take it I did a decent job. lol. Other peeves include the slightly stunted torso and ahem...over pronounced crotch as you shall see in the angle pic below. LOL. But the kit kinda grew on me after a while. The only drawback about this conversion is that unlike Optimus, the joints are not flexible and most of the stuff has to be glued into place, so not much room for posing.

Nothing else much to say, as I did not take any WIP pics. Just a couple of end pics to show you the results. Overall, a pretty straight-forward build. What's special is the greyish-beiege colour I managed to conjure up  by mixing random amounts of white-neutral grey and tank brown (if i recall correctly...this was a build from last year!). Enjoy.

Optimus Prime resin kit (RX conversion)

    Have you guys ever wondered why no one has ever thought of making a G1 Optimus Prime (the cartoon version) in gundam proportions? A Prime as we would like to imagine him, full-out mecha dynamism, without the boxy cartoony design, and not looking like Michael Bay's wet dream.

The only one that ever came close was Revoltech's Optimus Prime. But that wasn't a model kit, merely a small action figure. Why can't someone just make it happen???? It's probably due to licensing issues, and the fact that it's more worthwhile for companies to have TF toys be able to transform, so they need to be engineered accordingly, hence sacrificing aesthetics. Well...they are called Transformers.

So all the Optimus Primes we see are either clunky, boxy versions in toy stores, or insectoid robotic automatons like the movie version.

                   

What I wanna see, is this:

That's right. Pretty gundam-looking, wouldn't you say? So what happened was I spotted a resin conversion kit in HK last year, which had Optimus Prime parts that utlised the MG RX's frame for a conversion. The end result out-of-box, as you shall see later, is pretty crude-looking, but what the heck, this was probably as good a chance as ever I'm gonna get at modding a resin kit into an Optimus Prime with proportions I would like to see.

PG Double 0

All right folks, next up is one of my favourite pieces....This was one of my earliest 'serious' works where I've more or less figured out how to use the airbrush and build a kit. This was done about two years ago, and still remains one of my favourites, as it was only after this that I realised hey, I could produce some display-worthy work. That gave me the confidence to commit to this hobby.

MG Gundam Epyon

Here's a post on one of my latest works, the MG Gundam Epyon. Nothing much to say about this baby since it's an OOB job done for a store display. (I think you can still find it in the Gundam section at Vivo's Toys R Us). The highlight was having to complete it in four days. Yes, FOUR days!!! I think I struck off five years of my life span just from this build. Lol. It's definitely one of my most rushed jobs ever.

WTF

Here's a piece of work that is more uhhh....mainstream. A pimped up smurf!! Basically, the smurf movie marketing folks had some charity auction going on with my company so they got a few employees to soup up smurf figurines in whatever manner we desire, display them at Bugis Junction, and hope that somehow, we can convince the public to buy it. So here's mine (Apparently, some people are bidding for it, believe it or not). Behold, IRON SMURF --

Optimus Prime

I'm not a fan of the movie designs for Transformers but this is one of my favourite graphic of Optimus. Just check out the metallic details and texture on the gun, the paint scrapes and flakes on the armour....Robot porn!!!

HELLO WORLD

Okay so I'm probably a generation too late but at least it's a start! This will be where I share my Gundam builds and thoughts. Hopefully in time, this blog will grow to have an audience. Watch this space...

For starters, lets begin with some pics from my most elaborate work so far - a PG Astray Red Frame with dio for the 2010 Bakuc that came in as Best Newcomer. I'll provide a little commentary to the pics as they go along. Special thanks to my friends Toymaker and Leon Ku for their guidance and advice. And also to Adrian Lim for his help with the photo shoot. Enjoy!