08

I never understood why people would paint Gundams with their original colors when you have hundreds of colors and your imagination at your disposal. My day job as a graphic designer tends to force me to follow branding guidelines and deal with other restraints. So, when it comes to Gunpla, I tend to go rogue. I’m not saying other people are wrong, obviously, but I will most likely never paint a model with its original colors if I can help it.

This is the first model where I had custom painted every single aspect of the kit. With the Deathscythe and Sinanju builds, I had painted just the main plates or the details with a brush. With the Stamen, I took an outline of the mobile suit into photoshop and spent a couple hours designing several different color schemes with color blocks and layer styles so it didn’t look like a horrible coloring book.

01

For the endoskeleton, I hand painted every piece with a gold leaf acrylic. I hadn’t thought about thinning the paint at all and I don’t even think I primed it this time. I was pretty new at the hobby and had no idea what I was doing. The results were encouraging and I was excited to get the rest of the pieces painted and put together. I noticed a rigidity to the pieces once painted that I had not expected and I adapted accordingly when painting future models.

02

Being in New York City at the time, I realized that I needed a spray booth to vent all of the chemicals out of the place where I ate and slept. I bought an Ikea shelf, a box fan, casters and a hobby spray ventilator and Frankensteined my first spray booth together. A thousand square feet was not a lot of space to be using so many chemicals together, but I was just excited to get into the hobby and the dangers took a backseat.

After a couple test runs with my airbrush and rattle can primer, I finally started to paint the plates of the model with a nice matte white. It was very slow and painful while determining the paint to primer ratios and the flow of the airbrush itself. This first airbrush experience was pretty positive, but I knew that I had a long way to go.

03

The plates attached to the gold looked a lot better than I had expected at the time. Without thinning the paint, the gold pieces were very very thick and the plates took some coaxing to get on. Other than these small setbacks, I was pretty excited to move onto some of the masking.

04

I had never really done masking with actual paint before. I expected to be able to hand paint the masked parts like I had done with the gold leaf, but the gun metal paint showed my brush strokes much more prominently. Instead of continuing the hand paint these sections, I masked off the entire piece and went back to the airbrush. After airbrushing, the pieces looked much more uniform and clean. I doubt I will be hand painting any large areas again after this.

06

I had used a pearl clear coat on my Sinanju kit in order to give it a shimmer and sheen to match the cherry red paint. With the Stamen, everything was very flat and utilitarian and I opted for a matte finish. Instead of putting the whole kit together and spray the coat on at once, I kept them all in pieces.

07

So there you have it. Lots of initial hiccups, but it all came together nicely in the end. It’s not able to be positioned well due to the hand painting, but it was a great learning experience!