Next up : decals. A dreaded step for a lot of modelers for several reasons. Firstly, water decals are a bit hard to handle when you’re not used to it. Secondly, it’s tedious as hell. I usually put a dozen decals or two in a single session while watching TV, so for a build that big (and detailed) I’ll need about a week.

I have several decal sheets. Some Bandai ones (MG and HG), but recently I’ve been using some HiQParts decals and they are pretty cool. Since I bought white, red and black ones, I can get a coherent look on the kit. The quality is good, too, not like the ones I used for my 00Q GN-Sword.

Enough talk, here’s some pictures of the decaled-up parts :

I glued a photo-etch part before flat-coating, but I didn’t add the metal parts yet. That will be the very final step, I’m afraid the flat coat will dull them.

As someone in the Intermediate group put out, “I have beautiful feet” 😉

That’s about it. Decals aren’t really WIP-worthy so I’ll go straight to the final build :

Here it is ! But… something is strange… The proportions look a bit odd. Turns out the gatling’s “barrels” are way too short for the model’s size.

Fortunatly, since I plan to enter that kit at the GBWC this year, I’ve also bought Bandai gatlings. I didn’t think they’d arrive in time and I only planned to use them AFTER the Playing with Plamo competition, though.

The thing is, there’s about a week left before the deadline and I’m not sure I’ll be able to build four Gatlings and paint them (with washing, priming, base coating, chroming and clear coating that’s about 4-5 days of work, not counting the actual assembly). Still, I tried assembling one the see how it looks and behold ! The Bandai connector is compatible with Kotobukiya ! I only have to assemble four “cannons”, paint them and connect them to the existing gatlings. Here’s how it looks after painting :

I finally managed to make a good-looking chrome again… I’ll have to re-do the elbows and knees internals for the GBWC.

Times four :

As I said earlier in the WIP, I’m not sure adding blue to the tip of the barrels is the correct thing to do on an un-weathered kit. Since I’m completly out of time (for real this time), I’ll just leave it at that and consider it again for GBWC.

And it’s done ! Next up are the completed kit’s pictures. Since I’m doing an actual photoshoot for the competition there will be more pics than usual 😉

As of writing this post, I spent more than 3 months on the kit (January 17th to April 24th) and I’m quite satisfied with the result. There are A LOT of mistakes here and there, but only if you look at it really closely. While I’m not confident I have a shot at winning the competition anymore, it will look nice in my display case for many years.