Well folks, it’s that time of year again.
It’s time for Otakon.
While all of my friends spend countless hours trying to get all their cosplays done in time, I find myself relaxing while working on my Gunpla projects for the Gunpla Builders World Cup! Hey, it helps to have a friend that makes your costumes. Anyway, I’ve had a lot of creative juices flowing lately. It’s caused me to create a ton of stuff through stream of consciousness, with some coming out better than others. Either way, I’ve got plenty of stuff lined up this year.
First off, the Delta Plus from Unicorn. Yes, the same one I was working on almost two years ago and never finished. The Amuro custom colors I tried back then just didn’t work for me. Instead, I broke out my Neutral Gray and British Crimson and went to town with it, and the end result is just fantastic. I’m really happy with this one!
And yes, I’ll get to reviewing it soon.
Of course, I had to have my Out of Box entry, so here’s my Zeon Marasai. Nothing special done here. I used Model Masters Olive Drab and Marine Corps Green for this one—a pretty good color match, all things considered.
This year, I’m thinking of breaking into the 1/100 scale division. For whatever reason, I’ve been really into the suits from the F91 era lately. Unfortunately, all the old kits from that movie and its side stories are nearly impossible to find these days. So, I dug out my old Master Grade F91 and let myself go wild. It was supposed to be Harrison’s unit, but I decided against it because I didn’t want to work with that much yellow. I went for a low-visibility color scheme, based on the idea behind the G3 Gundam’s color scheme. I had some custom decals for this one ordered, but they haven’t come in yet.
As great as the F91 looks, I wish I felt that confident about my custom Qubeley. I was inspired by a really nice one I saw on the Internet and wanted to make one like it. I tried but I’m not too happy with this. The white paint wasn’t very agreeable even with the purple mixed in. Still, it’s coming with me because of how much I worked on this. Once I get my decals in, I’ll be giving this a nice pearl coat.
I finally started working on my Gundam Epyon Master Grade, using a silly new method I thought up. I build one section of the kit (body+head, arms, etc) in my room, and then move to my basement to paint them. It works sort of like tunnel-vision, and keeping the rest of the kit far away keeps me from getting distracted. So far, it’s been working pretty well!
And for the heck of it, I’m gonna bring my old 1/100 Epyon, too.
To keep myself busy while I let parts of Epyon dry, I decided to pull out an SD Deathscythe I’ve had sitting around. Hey, that division doesn’t have much competition. 😉 (sorry, I forgot to grab a picture of this one!)
…and for the local division, I’ve got my GM Sniper II. Sigh. Stupid Bandai announcing an HGUC after I blew so much money on three sets of conversion parts. Still, I slaved over this stupid thing and I’ll be damned if it isn’t coming with me. Shame I can’t enter it in the main division, though.
I’ve got three and a half weeks until the actual con. I’m sure everything will come together, because damn I’m excited. I’m hoping this’ll be the best one yet. Remember that the contest comes to New York Comic-Con, and you should grab some stuff to build for that at FPNYC!
Oh wow! I met you at the Bluefin booth at Otakon. I’m trying to figure out who won the prizes, and came across this page. Here is the interesting part: we do a Gunpla podcast, called Shelf Life (www.shelflife.tk) and recently we did an episode reviewing the history of Gunpla. In said episode, I referred our listeners to your articles on the same topic here! Had I known that I was speaking to “Loran” at Otakon, I would have thanked you in person for helping others to make sense of the long and convaluted history of Gundam models.
Wonderful work, especially the beautiful F91, and I hope to see you again next year! Hopefully I will bring some better competition than a hastily rattle-canned RG Freedom 🙂