I got into something new recently - well something actually so old that I haven't really thought about it since I was a teenager - plastic model kits!
Back when I was doing these, they were sprue sheets of solid white, blue, or red etc, and required painting. I remember those cursed little bottles of Tamiya paints - I loved them and hated them at the same time. I loved that I could paint all these cool model kits of robots and anime characters that I could get, and I hated that brushing them on, they were all streaky and blotchy, nothing like the way the kits looked on the box. I was fairly precise with a brush, but I lacked experience and technique, so I found these paints way too thick to go on the model kits nicely.
I remember spending days painting the radar nacelle on a Zetaplus and getting mad at how hard it was to get the paint to behave. I didnt really know about masking off sections I didnt want paint to accidentally touch, so I did all of it freehand. It was also hard to get all those black detail lines in precisely - I ended up using
a black paint/water wash to wick the paint into the lines, but it took
so long to do, a tiny bit at a time wiping away excess that got onto the other colors. The results were still pretty good for my level of experience, but I was not really satisfied with the results. Eventually I gave up painting them, just keeping the ones I had, sitting nicely in a display on a bookshelf all through my 20s - a bunch of Gundam kits: Zeta, a Mark II, a Zetaplus, and an Ex-S. Also, a Macross Battroid Valkyrie and a 1/4th scale 80's Dirty Pair Kei and Yuri.
Anyways, this time it started off when I was at a toy store with my son Connor in the springtime, and we saw a
Gundam model kit with 2 units in it, for the incredibly low price of
$40, an incredible steal considering that typically this stuff costs $30
to $50 for a single one. Here we'd get 2 of the big names in the
Gundam series, a Gundam RX-78 original and a green MS-06 Zaku as an
opponent, for a mere $25 each! I decided I had to buy and assemble
them. I reasoned that I could let my son play with the robots after
they were built. They came in multi-coloured plastics and everything and didn't even need paint or glue! OMG! So since Connor was behaving pretty well at the time, I bought it for us so we could both get some fun out of these Gundams.
They took about 3 days to assemble, and Connor smashed them both up pretty nicely within a week. Not too bad. Lasted longer than I thought, actually. They weren't too terribly smashed up though. Mostly the joints were too weak to survive kids twisting them and smashing them together in a "fight". I am still repairing them now and then for Connor using superglue. (reminds me, I have to glue two feet back on the Gundam and an arm on the Zaku)
So looking at these models got me thinking about my own models again. Sadly, I had thrown my collection out a while ago, but I still had a few un-built ones sitting around - notably a Hyaku Shiki that I'm pretty sure I picked up in the early 90s. So I pulled out the kit to take a look at it:
I had already painted it at some point, but never assembled it. Looking closely at the kit, I remember not liking that the gold paint was streaking, especially on the wings and ankles, and the detail on the chest plate was all wobbly.
Ugh... I'll have to do this over again, properly this time. With primer, paint, decals, and a finishing coat.
So first things first - How do I strip off the old paint?!
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