July 21, 2013

Real Grade Zaku II Work In Progress 02

Hell- I was bored this afternoon after assembling a pool pump for my family and I went down into the shop and checked the real grade Zaku II. It was in pieces and I couldn't find the manual- so I brought my mom's laptop down into the shop, used dalong.net's scans (thanks for the translations on colors, too!) and re-assembled the kit. I have a new strategy for painting.

There are a couple of basic colors I will be using. Primer Gray, Panzer Gray and a mix of colors for the camou that I will determine on site at the hobby store tomorrow. Instead of masking the joints and doing the camou, I am going to paint like this.

The entire kit will be primered as one enchilada. Then I will paint the underlying coat for the camou everywhere. Then I will do a good job and clear coat the underlying work. Then I am going to use non-hardening clay to mask the underlying work and pray (to the paint gods) that the clay doesn't bring the paint up.

I've also heard of people using cotton balls to do camou, but my problem is that this real grade is too small and using cotton balls would be difficult- so I will try the clay method. If the clay doesn't work, I'll see if I have some liquid mask lying around somewhere- but good god if I don't put that on right it will be a pain in the ass to clean up.

I will then paint the second color and let it dry. At that point I can either clear coat over that paint, or take the clay up and then clear coat over everything. I may do the latter just to be consistent. Then I will paint the gun camou too. To make it look consistent I would want to paint the gun along with the kit. HOWEVER, in reality they probably would have painted it separately. So what I will do is camou the rifle separately in the same camou pattern. It will look like it belongs, but it won't.... how can I say this... it won't look like they camou'd the entire robot including the gun in one pass.

The kit looks... bigger than I remembered. I could have swore it was 1-2 inches shorter. Regardless- it looks really good; the detail is fantastic- and quite honestly I'm thinking about a Yonem Kirks/RG Zaku II kit bash in the future.

The lease on our potential apartment doesn't begin until September 1st, so I figure I have some time to get this RG in, and possibly. POSSIBLY- Sandrock.

No comments: