NG IMPULSE

So as you may have noticed, 4pakisdead . . er . It's degraded itself into an assorted bin of internet memes and blog plagiarism. The lowest of the Internet.

To be fair, this is what we wanted. Community blogging and the sharing, support, unity along with the ethnics problems associated with unorganized collaborations. It didn't really matter if we had a bad run. Besides, who was going to read our blog besides only ourselves anyway?

Site statistics would suggest otherwise.

As surprise to many, myself included, we have a following! Little, fickle and brittle as such a curious crowd is, there is a small colony of returning visitors everyday! But theyre a choosey bunch and strange as it may sound, that viral youtube video with a million hits receives less than 10 on the blog! The big hitters, the ones drawing in the crowds, are the posts with original content, such as works in progress, personal bests, anecdotes or factual pieces.

This post isn't meant to discourage fellow friends and myself from posting videos or recycling other blog content, keep on doing it !! It's far more convenient than forward or a hyperlink and posting it on a blog is still a great way to share a good find. However, on the odd occasion it would be nice to read something different or creative! Anything will do, a rant, poem, thought, review, report, drawing or even a link to something of interest.

TO THE GUNDAM

So .. as youve noticed, the last few blog entries of mine have been fairly insignificant in the eyes of the mecha minded that visit this blog! But dont take that as a sign of inactivity! No! This last week ive been happily working away at my latest project or test as i see it. The non-grade 1/144 force impulse. Yeahhh.. i know what you are thinking .. that broke ass motherfucker. From the super-mega-deluxe-with-the-stand-included VF25 ARMORED to the 10 dollar bargain bin kit ( i actually think it was less than 10 dollars when i bought it)

Well the reason ive chosen to work on this is because i see this kit as a test of my hand painting skills. Early on in my budgeting for this year i realised i was never going to afford an airbrush so i did the only reasonable thing that any-one would come to. Get pro at pastels. Art has never been so economical. Since i suck at painting then it's best to start cheap yeah ???

onto the kit.

Ehhe .. well i knew it was cheap but i didnt expect it to be this bad . The box is so bland that bandai didnt deem it worthy for box art so just rehashed some promo material and slapped on some lineart on the side. It doesnt get much better inside. Theres some 3 or 4 runners(i wasnt really looking, its too painful to look at), everything comes as a single moulding or as 2 pieces so articulation is nonexistent and the mould colors are slightly off. Not that it matters anyway since ill paint it.
probably the most funny thing about this kit is the manual ... if you could call it that , its literally an a4 sheet with color assembly! COLOR ASSEMBLY! Thats big pimping from bandai ! Not even my PG strike has that! Admittedly when you only have 10 pieces its a bit easier and when you omit a painting guide its not even a manual, more of a hollow wonder.

Anyways, built it up and glued some parts so that the seams are less obvious, i cant be botthered puttying cos i really didnt want to primer everything.

So here it is, sanded and masked.

Now for the paint !

Wtf ... maybe the other bottle will turn out better

wrong .. so wrong ... Tamiya arcrylic is shit. I completely understand why no pro modelller would even touch it unless it was for an airbrush ! The brush marks are everywhere, opacity is terrible and its plain annoying to work with.

Here it is after a coat.

From 2009-05-18 force impulse nongrade

I ran into problems early on with the wings as they needed primer. Unfortunately for me , tamiya primer is almost as terrible as the white. For a start its thick , but when thinnned its useless. I met a halfway compromise and just decided to layer a thick one and sand it back. And on went the red.

Red doesn't have the same problems as white, probably because its matte, not semi gloss and the red container doesnt look like a flowery tofu dessert when left alone for a day.

After that i realised i had a few enamel paints i could use and decided to test them out. Tamiya gloss blue and Revell satin black. Mixed with thinner on a makeshift palette, a defunct T-Card, courtesy of the former governments incompetency to steup a decent ticketing system, and went to work applying paint to the calf and backpack.

Immediately you can feel the difference. Arcrylic paints suck balls.Enamel is actually workable because the paint takes much longer to settle, removing the brush marks and making the paint more even.

Next step , the acrylic red dried so i decided to use some gloss red i had to make it work with the gloss theme of the impulse. I also used some acrylic clear blue gloss on the body as well. The red turned out so so ... was a bit too candy , whereas the blue was liveable .. overall quite happyNext was the detailings.. i decided to paint the crest and V insigias gold an ten go over the gold in yellow to dull it slightly. The light blue segments would just be white with some gloss or enamel painted over them, The vents i used a matte grey that seemed to work well..

it came out alright...

now i need to wait for the pain to dry(2-3days) and then i will panel line the model. My lamp has become a makeshift hangar for things to dry off (:

wip 2 to come later ! 

Tim