I’ve been working on this K.O.G. from The Five Star Stories, and the front is finally at a point where I’m happy to show it assembled.

I often see F.S.S. kits finished with beautifully smooth airbrushed metallics, so for this one I wanted to see what would happen if I treated the gold entirely as a brush-painted NMM surface and kept the brushwork visible.

A lot of the stroke work comes from a hatching technique I experimented with on an earlier Gelgoog. On the larger armor panels I build the highlights with directional strokes, often spreading outward from the brightest area. From a distance they merge into the metallic surface, while up close the individual marks are still very obvious. In some areas the highlight shapes are deliberately pushed a little further for composition, similar to the way metallic surfaces are sometimes treated in 2D mecha illustration.

The lighting setup is fairly simple: a strong key light coming from above and in front, plus a broad cool skylight. I think of the two lights almost as competing for territory. Most of the front is strongly controlled by the key light, so I kept those areas relatively pure gold. As the influence of the key light drops toward the sides and recessed areas, the muted blue-green skylight starts to take over.

I also gave the ground reflections different colors. The right side picks up orange-red, while the left side shifts toward green. There is another orange-red reflection between the legs, almost as if the K.O.G. were standing over a red carpet. Part of the reason for doing this was to make the color balance change as you move around the model: the left view becomes greener and calmer, while the right gives a stronger orange-red / blue-green contrast.

The back is still unfinished, so this is only the front half of the experiment for now.

I’d be interested to hear how the visible brushwork reads to other painters — does it still feel metallic from a normal viewing distance, or does it start to read more like an illustration?

Price: 139 RMB or $20.68 USD (likely closer to $50 when released)
Release window: September 2026

Comes with 1/144 ball seen in image

And first painted pilot, loved every minute. I used Bandai waterslides and Gaianotes EX clear. Gunmetal and gun chrome for the grey parts. The decals went on easy enough but they don't adhere very well and didn't react much with MicroSol. In some cases I needed to go back many times with the Sol to get what I wanted. Clear coat solves the adhesion problem.

It was a whole lot of fun. Excited to do another one!

This was a custom from a while back, one of my first attempts to detail up a kit.

Been starting a photo archive of my kits. Mainly for myself, but also so that I finally get to post here :)

- Kit: HG 1/144 Gundam Aerial

- Work: Custom paint, (lacquer paint, airbrush), scribing & detail work, Flaming Snow waterslides.

2 big reasons

I'm a sucker for robot girl.

First time building metal frame kit, why Bandai don't use metal frame? It's pretty good.

The build itself was fine. There were some defective parts, and many parts were too tight.

You're supposed to build a giant snake thing too, but i look at the building process in the manual and went "nope"

Finished last night, but wanted to wait til I get some sun to take pictures. Sunlight is really the best lighting. I thought I leave this a clean build bc in the anime/manga Lorenz got a completely new (or refurbished) unit.

The kit does come with their own decals. But most of the decals just say "caution" on them. So I didn't want to have caution decals plastered over everything. The kit also does not come with a guide on where decals are to be placed, so you have to do some research or just go with your imagination. Decals are also clustered very closely on the sheet so you will need an exact knife to get pieces you want.

Overall, this is a pretty ok kit. The end result looks great though.

I put it next to a RG Zaku for scale. I also put glow-in-the-dark stickers in the visor for glow effect. The jewel in the head is not part of the kit, had to buy nail art jewels sticker sheet for that one. I think it turned out ok.

Not really feeling like trying to pose this guy more so just a simple pic.

After Building the HG ground gundam I figured the HG Ez8 would be very similar and just as good. So when I found one clearanced at Michaels I figured why not.

The look of this kit is pretty nice and clean. A lot of the parts come together to produce a nice armored look.

I really like a lot of the intricacies in the armor and the head especially that really sell the kit and with minimal color correction it’s nice even out of the box.

The big thing is the parachute unit which I really want to get another unit for my ground gundam now!! It’s so cool!

Unfortunately that’s kinda where my positives end and the mehs start. That freaking head though is a hate, idk if I assembled something wrong but like the boy can’t look up to save his life.

The mobility on this suit seems quite reduced from its mass production counterpart especially the arms. Posing with the rifle was wrestling with a rhino, it just won’t budge at times.

Combine that with leg armor held on by a prayer in the back and stiff knee joints it’s just meh.

So yeah looks nice but I’m not going to pose this one much.

Edit: someone pointed out that the Ez8 is not a revive kit like the ground gundam is so that 5 years of time between the reason for the large difference in design quality.

Chilling n healing

I was building in very remote place with a headlight only. Thought the lighting looks quite dramatic

Pay attention to the elbow joint of this kit when posing, people always talk about the shoulder joint but never this joint as a point of failure

sharing my kits from february to now, most of them are bootlegs but my experience for building them was good

I can't paint the small gundam, too smol

Having some fun posing High Grades!

Really proud of how Red turned out.

Love the whole line, but can’t be arsed to color correct the spots I missed on the G🦆 yet.

Really enjoyed the kit especially with some 3rd party decals. It poses great and overall just has fantastic aesthetics; it's easily one of my favorite MGs now.

Supposed to be blue, but there's no reason why it can't be a Commander model instead! Keycap for size comparison.

Finally got a chance to build one of my grails, thanks to the recent reprint. What a timeless design this beauty is! Although, I struggled a fair bit with its many gate marks, the time spent, imo, was well wroth it!

Also, did a few custom mods to it - green led in the eyes, blue led in each sabre handle, a blue led in the rifle's side scope, and some red leds in the back thrusters. Nothing too brush :) But the kit turned into a statue because of that (running wires inside it) 🤷

oh, and the little mgsd buddy is a 3p kit from anaheim collectibles - not the best experience with that one. its a cool attempt and i appreciate the effort, but it has quite a few issues (hard plastic on joints cracks and gets loose, quite finicky to handle to begin with, etc etc) and the standard price for it is a bit ridiculous.

Cheers!

I can’t believe that I like Xi gundam, and kinda slowly starting to like Penelope now.

I built Alyzeus a while ago and I love him so much. Back then, I didn’t really like Xi or Penelope. But after seeing people’s Xi gundam, I kinda started to like him.

I just painted some parts here and there, still need to clean up the paint and do decals and edge highlights for him. I just wanted to have him with me while watching the Hathaway movies!

So I picked up an mgex strike freedom from a collector, he said its been in backlog for over a year.
Now I also bought a new one on amazon, but it looks different.
Can someone help me with this? im so confused because of the color difference.

I think I may be stuck on these smaller kits for a while. This was so fun, I used less paint and it was so much faster lol. I hope you enjoy.

Paint list:

Hobby mio-matte and gloss black, dark stainless steel, dark iron.

After months of sitting on Wing Zero I finally finished it up and got the gang back together