SD Blaze Zaku Phantom (Rei Za Burrel)

After a realistic kit (the Nemo) and a lot of dual action airbrush practice (Kämpfer) I thought my skills were honed enough to make one for my girlfriend. One night while I was browsing HLJ she said I should get “that pink one”. By that she meant something I don’t remember anymore, but this SD kit was even better. “It looks so cute with that big head!” Allright, the kit was approved and I could set off with the paint job. This will be a simple and flat paintjob, but not a rushed one. Clean and girly, so pink, polkadots and metallic flakes. Allright, My First Zaku is being born!

June 1, 2009 Ofcourse something had to go wrong, even if this is such a small kit so when I snap fitted the sucker a peg broke off of one of the flaps that are attached to the backpack. I didn’t want to glue it together or repair this since the kit will mainly be standing on it’s own and doesn’t need all the movement and gimmicks I think…

All the parts are now further prepped for primer. I removed some panellines, there weren’t much of them, but stil. Some other panelines have been rescribed with the back of my knife and after all that everything has been washed in a little hot water with some detergent. Left it to dry and put everything up on sticks so now the whole kit is ready for it’s first layer of primer!

June 3, 2009 Today was the great day. I already wanted to start priming yesterday, but something came in between. I built a lightbox and finished it today! Anyway, the Zaku parts are now all primed. Doing this was a bitch because the light gray and white parts make it almost impossible to see where I allready primed and where not… As you can see with the shield. It looks white, but believe me, it is primed!

After this some more sanding will be done and then, after the second layer of primer I will make all panellines pure black. If that is then follow by the colors, the panels will apear in a very nice darker shaded then the colors on the parts. This gives the whole kit a smooth look. Check out this GM to see what I mean.

June 5, 2009 Last night I got some good progress. Applied the second layer of primer and then I got out my set of Rotring Radiograph pens and panellined every crack of this little sucker. It still looks a bit messy, but I still have to clean up the panellines. I know, I know…

I shot this pictures using my lightbox (for the first time!) and I think they turned out fairly decent. I still have to get the right bulbs and make a nice setup for them, but this first try made me confident the lightbox works! A negative point is when you’re so close on the model you see a lot of flaws you missed with the naked eye… So I have some more sanding to do, there are some seamlines left on the rifle.

June 6, 2009 I wanted this kit to be a quick one so here’s another small update just before the weekend… I cleaned up the panellines with q-tips. First I tried it with alcohol, but rubbing too much resulted in removing primer. So then I just used some water. This went much better. After the clean up I inspected all the pieces and planned on the painting. What to mask, darker colors go easy over a lighter one. The other way around sucks so that’s another thing to keep in mind. That said I started of with white. The white I made was a bit too thin I guess and I have to go over it all one more time.

I think the prepainted panellines blend in well. Onething (actually two) I screwed up tough is the head and the torso. I forgot to give them a second primer coat and wanted to lay on the white coat, but that didn’t went ok. The white was too thin so I couldn’t get it to cover the primer. You could still see the spots that were sanded down to the bare plastic (in pink and white spots). So those parts are now stripped of their primer.

I’ll reprime them and rejoin them with the other white parts. The actually color scheme will be published later this weekend :)

June 7, 2009 Weekend so another nice update! I got a lot done and until the end everything went smooth as it should, but that was until I found out that the water in the diluted metallic paint got messy with the panellines…

First I started masking of all the white parts that needed to remain white. Just like the polkadots… It took a while to get them all on, but the result was worth it! To see how I made these perfect circles from the masking tape you got to see my tutorial here.

After the masking I got on to the spraying the pink paint. Nothing special just a bit of Flat White with a few drops of Character Red. It went on smooth and there is nothing more rewarding then removing masking tape that took an evening to apply, hehe.

I decided that all the pink parts (with an exception of some pink in the vents on the chest and on the lower legs) will have white dots and will be covered with some metallic. I got this paint from a friend for whom Ihelped out with some papermodels.

It’s from Vallejo and simply called Metallic Medium. It’s not suited for airbrushing so had to change the tip from 0.2 to 0.4 and still had some trouble… I thinned it with water and a small drop of detergent to break the surface tension. Like I said, allthough I used a bigger tip I still had some trouble, but it worked and sticked nicely to the pink layer of paint. When everything dried I notived one bit error. The water in the mixture must some how have reached into the panellines and messed up the ink that’s in there. Annyway, take a look at the pictures…

The Radiograph ink is not waterproof (which I knew), but this really sucks. I hope I can remove the stains with a little bit of water, apply a layer of Future and then re-apply the metallics. Man it would suck to redo this all over again!

August 19, 2009 Well, well, that took some time to make another update… As some of you might have read this was due to a broken airregulator. Allright, I haven’t done much, but it involves loads of masking right now. Using some Patafix (or Blutack) I masked off the internals of the vents on the back pack. See for yourself!

Well this sucker is just such a pain in the ass to paint. The minimum of parts makes it a maximum to mask… Damn.

August 25, 2009 Slowly but steady progress is made. All parts that need a darker shade of gray are now ready to be painted. I noticed this big old seamline on of the cables in the picture, but because it is not that visible in reallife PLUS I don’t feel like fixing it, it will just stay there.

In the pictures you can clearly see the way I mask. I tend to use the expensive Tamiya tape on the edges and along all the nasty corners and creecks. Then I use a cheap no-brand tape to mask of the rest of the piece. As for the vents on the backpack, the inside has been painted red and it needs to stay red so I filled them up with a bit of my UHU Plast. Put in a small ball of the putty and using a cocktail stick push it in all the corners. It helps to wetten the stick using some saliva or water, this keeps the putty from sticking to the, uh, stick. Well all is prepped so on to the Extra Dark Seagray it is!

September 1, 2009 Dark gray has been applied and so is a light gray. Everything that needed color has color now so it was of to the clear coat. A first layer has been applied and tomorrow or a bit later I will spray on a second coat. Doing the shiny frame in my Nemo I found out that patience can make it really shine. The Parket Plus (or Future) has the ability to level itself out pretty good. So when sprayed on it looks all messy and bubbly, but after drying it turns out to be a much smoother finish that it looked like when wet. Here is some eyecandy.

You can see some glittering on the shield… It’s hard to catch in a photo, but I assure you it is there :). The mono eye was made by painting a pink dot and using a foil sticker from the kit has a mask. After that the rest was sprayed with black, remove the sticker and voilá; a perfect monoeye!

This kit needs just a few more clear coats and then it is finished! I want it to be Stormtrooper shiny and white. I am happy to start on my Zaku after this. An MG Zaku Minelayer. Allready snapped together but I am still planning some stuff for the finish. Wait for the shoot of this kit now, that’s about it ;)