Monday, November 30, 2015

WIP: Fuunsaiki (Gundam Unicorn)


Stating a commission for my prettiest client yet!

A while back, I converted one of my son's drawings into reality, the "My Rhino Can Laser" piece. Now that my daughter is old enough to appreciate it, I decided to do something similar. She's a fantastic mix of girly girl and nerd. She'd just as soon play with a dinosaur as a Barbie doll. This results in some interesting mashups for her playtime. Her favorite song is "Battle Dancing Unicorns" by Five Iron Frenzy, so when I searched for a fun model kit to do for her, I saw this and immediately bought it. A robot unicorn!? Yes please. The basing and pose options were perfect for what I wanted to attempt.

The idea was to make the unicorn overly typical...glittery paint job, lots of bright colors and rainbows, but on the other side, overly aggressive robotic fighting lasers! This kit gives the ability to do both extremely well.

The unicorn itself is really more of a base for the Gundam that comes with it (and I might get my Gundam terminology wrong throughout some of this, and even might blaspheme the kit this is supposed to represent. If so, apologies to the Gundam hardcore out there). It is not intended to be the main focus, from what I have gathered. However, it will be the sole thing I do from this box. This is all meant to be good, goofy fun, not be a Gundam representation or a model contest winner, so the pressure is off!

So looking at the way the model is displayed, it has a base in an, um...."interesting" location. In order to mix my memes, I figured I would modify the base to be as close to the robot fighting unicorn "pooping" a rainbow as possible, because that's just mandatory. However, there's almost zero surface area to the base at all. I would need to change that to make my rainbow.


That middle "supporting" line actually is thicker than the front and back lines of the stand, so it was dremeled down as close to flat as I could get it:


From there, I laid the base down and did a quick crude trace of it onto sheet styrene:


I traced it twice, and cut out two copies, one for each side.


After that, I glued the new pieces down and used clamps to keep the pressure up. With styrene, the properties are such that the glue melts it, and fuses the pieces, rather than literally gluing it together. This creates a flush bond when done properly.


At this stage, I'm not concerned about the overage of the styrene. I can trim and sand down flush with the stand, and then its time to prime and paint!!!

No comments:

Post a Comment