Finally some progress. I primed and pre shaded everything over the weekend and applied a black base on the parts that will be painted metallic with Alclad gloss black base. I also used this same paint to do the pre shading.

I primed using Mr Base White 1000, and although the result is good the paint doesn’t have as good coverage as regular surfacer, as I ended up using a wooping 20 mm of paint and thinner mixture. That’s a record, and this is just a 1/144 scale model. Other than that Mr White Base is just what you would expect from a Gunze product, quality stuff.

Next was doing the pre shading, and as mentioned I figured I would try Alclad gloss black base for it, together with my procon boy platinum 0.2, an airbrush I bought in Japan a few years ago but never used until now.

The airbrush works great, but for pre shading I did have a bit of trouble with the paint. For some reason it wouldn’t spray smoothly when using low air pressure and or low paint flow, and instead of giving me some nice smooth lines I ended up with speckled ones. Since this is for shading I actually don’t dislike the effect and being enamel paint I can freely tone down the effect as I wish. I will be going over the parts and doing some clean up, but for now I leave a couple of examples so you can tell me what you think.

Both the rifle and the forearm used to have nasty seam lines where the halves met, but now they don’t. In the rifle I also had to rescribe the lines since the two pieces where not perfectly aligned and I had to sand quite a bit to make it even. I’m happy with the result.

The same paint I used to pre shade I also used to base coat the parts for the inner frame and for this it worked like a charm. I will need to sand a couple of them to make them really shiny and apply a second coat on all of them, but even now the glossiness is already coming through.

There also used to be a seam line in this last part.

I can’t wait for the weekend to start applying actual colour and make this start looking like an actual gundam !