You are currently browsing the monthly archive for May, 2008.
Hurrah!!! Tis time to celebrate a very special Birthday!!! No, not mine. That was last week.
Today, this blog officially turns 1 year old!!! It was on the 29th last year when I started this blog and opened it with a post about my Bubba Haruhi and 52 weeks later, it’s still going after a “1 post per week” policy (well, except for that time I had no internet for a while). To be honest, I never thought it would last as long as this… When I first started the blog, I thought that it would last a few months with regular updates and then maybe a post when I finished a kit before finally dying of lack of exercise, but it’s still here, with regular updates and no worries about future content (for now)!!!
This part is where I get all mushy and thank all of you, the readers, for making this blog as successful as it is. Never in my wildest dreams did I think that my hobby and works would get as many hits as it does a week. It’s no Dannychoo.com or Heisei Democracy but it’s still pretty good for a little upstart blog about a very niche hobby!
So, in order to celebrate this occasion, I thought I would share a few pics which depict all the figures I have in my current residence (so basically everything built which isn’t in my gundam army collection.
Here’s everything in 1 neat pic. I’ll go through them all in more detail but you can probably already see some familiar faces who have graced the blog already, and others who will be doing so in the near future. The main point of interest would be my glass cabinet. I use it almost exclusively for my painted resin kits, so that hold my entire portfolio, as it were.
I’ll go through the shelves first and then give closeups of the resin kits after the jump.
So yesterday, I went along with a friend to the London Expo which was being held at the Excel Center in the docklands. I tend to avoid events like that as I don’t really have that much interest in the special events held and such but I thought I’d go to 1 for the experience and see what they had to offer.
Looks like I didn’t miss much…
The event itself was pretty much for cosplayers who massed outside the event, and I really dislike cosplay. So I hope that people who read this blog don’t get too offended when I start rolling off the bad ones. Kudos for those who enjoy doing it and even greater kudos to those who pull it off well, but the ratio of good-to-bad was not pretty…
There were some really good points tho. For a start, the cosplay of Hard Gay wins everything, without even trying. Like Chuck Norris.
There were some good Code Geass cosplays too. Cornelia and Guilford were the best, but the group also had their shares of not-so-good.
And we have a shout-out to orbital comics!! Rock on guys!! Believe in us who believe in you!!! Rock Haruhi also says Hi.
but what about the expo itself?
I think everyone who has seen the nadesico movie have the same opinion of it. (it was pretty poo) but there were some good points. Personally, I liked the Astromeras which was seen very close to the end at the “concert” but the main mecha was, without a doubt, the black Sarena. Piloted by everyones favourite cook Akito Tenkawa (oh wait, was that a spoiler?).
This model was released in March and is part of the Soul Of Chogokin line. Normally, the SoC line deals mostly with super robots but they created a special line for the “real” robots called the SPEC line. Currently, it’s dominated by the Evangelion mecha but they also have Dragonar Unit 1 and SPT Layzner in the lineup as well.
The black sarena is the latest release in the line which offers the same attention to detail and die cast construction one expects from the main Soul of Chogokin line. So how does it fare?
And so, what it my main project at the moment? This…
Ignis from Cerberus Project. You know? the one which Yamato has recently announced that they were going to make into a PVC kit?
Man, I still remember the hard time I had trying to find one of these babies after last years summer Wonderfestival. Had to pay a pretty penny for it as well! And now it’s coming out as a cheap PVC… orz
well, good luck to them. They’re probably going to need it (yes, I am a little bitter about the announcement. This is the first kit I have bought which has been (or rather will be) converted into a PVC figure, which lowers it’s overall value). The pic above shows the model after pinning and most of the flash removed and sanded out. There are some seam lines left which will need to be taken care of, but cleanup has been pretty good this time round.
Those of you who have been reading the blog for a while now (or could be bothered to look through the archives) will know that I have a resin kit of the Knight of Gold from the Five Star Stories. I’ve had it for quite a while now but never really got into building it for several reasons;
1) it’s ridiculously complex! I have said this before put the number of parts to this kit vastly exceed any and every other kit I have in my collection. In fact it has more than the next 2 combined!
2) a lot of the parts are very small and still require cleanup. The resin used also isn’t the best and is quite brittle, thereby increasing the chance of a major mess up which cannot be fixed.
I basically got around the problem by getting an abundance of (misplaced?) overconfidence now that I have 4 more kits under my belt. I also decided to try and break it down into smaller projects as opposed to one long, continuous one like I normally do. So I’m going to do the legs first and then lower and upper bodies separately and eventually build it up instead of doing a complete pre-build and painting the whole thing in 1 go. It will allow me to focus on a small bit at a time and, hopefully, stop me from getting overwhelmed.
3) But the biggest issue was that, with a name like “knight of gold” you would want it to be, well, GOLD!! But as I explained with my lancelot, the actual colour of gold is really REALLY hard to get right!!
But using the information I was able to gather when I was mixing the gold for the lancelot, I was able to mix a colour I was happy with. And it only took a year to work out the solution to the problem. What does it look like?
Despite Code Geass R2 being inferior to Macross Frontier in pretty much every respect *dodges thrown projectiles* it did get me in the mood for a Geass related model. So I dug this one up and finished it off over the long weekend.
Presenting the “white death.” 7th Generation Knightmare frame, Lancelot!
I bought this kit a while back (before Christmas) so I’m afraid that there’s no float system included in this release. Having said that, I will openly admit that I hate the Float pack!! As a practical tool it’s useful but it’s so damn ugly!!!! But I guess it would have been useful for certain photoshoots.
