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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?
Stuff happens…
Sods law struck just before this update when I ran out of spray paint for 1 last remaining wing. So unfortunately, the completion of strike freedom, which was supposed to be todays post, has been delayed while I get more paint.
To make matters more annoying, my usual model shops no longer stock any Tamiya spray paints (most likely because they are extremely toxic and probably prone to abuse by little kids). Luckily, I braved the internet to find 1 shop which stocks the required paint so I should be able to finish this project soon. In the meantime, we have comparison pics!
The upper gold parts were coloured using gold gundam marker. I wanted to use my usual technique of painting the part silver and then using yellow ink to get a very vibrant gold colour, but I learned from past experiences that it is not applicable in these sorts of cases as they scratch very easily and the wings do not allow for repair work. The gundam marker paint is more resistant to scratching off but isn’t as shiny as the chrome part. I think it’s a good compromise and it certainly looks better than what it was originally.
Nearly at the home stretch now. With this, the vast bulk of the work is done. All that’s left it the DRAGOON system backpack and beam rifles. All the armour parts are done!
Not too bad really. I really do prefer the Chrome-ish grey look over the shiny gold which was supposed to be on the frame!
Not much to update now. The inner frame has been completely painted in a mix of dark grey and metallic paint to give it a sort of shiny grey look. Pretty hard to see from this pic and will be even harder once it’s fully completed since only a small amount will be visible…
The gold parts near the top correspond to the air vents once the outer armour is applied. I had planned to make them gold since the beginning, but I must admit that the initial grey did look very good! There was also some very minor detailing done in certain areas (like the pistons in the feet) and the whole frame was drybrushed with a dark metal colour to highlight some more details but the main point was to try and remove some of that plastic look, which worked out pretty well.
The hands were also slightly modified by having the fingers cut into separate digits. Initially, the 4 fingers and thumb came in 3 parts with the 3 less used digits moulded in 1 part. I cut them separately to give it a little more articulation. you can see the difference in the pic after the jump.
After noticing a disturbing lack of mecha (one of my fave anime genres, if not my #1) I though I would go back and start on a gunpla! I’ve actually had strike freedom for quite some time after preordering it last year! I even remember ordering the “special edition” version before anyone even knew what was so special about it, but at long last, Strike Freedom Full burst is starting to show!
I’ll be honest here, I’m not a big fan of Strike Freedom. I much prefer the original incarnation (which I already have the MG for). My dislike for the mecha may have stemmed from the show it appeared in, but I do tend to keep to a pseudo “hate the pilot, not the mecha” approach, except in this case…
Nevertheless, I picked up the MG and what is shown above is the “out of the box” look for the kit.
So far very little is done to it, but that will change.
