HMM Dibison
The HMM Dibison came out back in late 2014 and I probably built it the following year, so none of this is exactly hot off the presses. But I still think this is one of the best designed kits in the HMM line and the weathering I did on it was a huge step up for me just in terms of overall technique, so I thought it was worth writing about.
The box calls this the “Thoma Version” of Dibison because it’s piloted by Thomas Schubaltz in Guardian Force, but in terms of appearance, there’s nothing different about it to the standard version – as I recall, it didn’t even come with stickers, so there aren’t any Guylos emblems to indicate that it’s been converted from a Helic Zoid. The kit does include two pre-painted figurines of the character, one sitting, one standing, so if you’re no good at painting miniatures and you care about these characters, I guess that’s something to get excited about. I’m just miffed because the display stand for the standing one doesn’t really work, which is also why I didn’t bother with a picture.
Now I’ve always felt that, despite being a mammal Zoid, the Dibison captures the rugged, mechanical look I want from my Zoids better than many others, and Kotobukiya somehow managed to improve on the original kit in this regard. This is truly a reinterpretation that looks… I don’t know, as if it was always meant to look this way. It’s also free of any of Kotobukiya’s usual puzzling color choices, fiddly construction or poor engineering. It’s just a perfect kit in every way.
Since it does the rugged war machine look so well, I actually taught myself how to drybrush just for this kit so that I could bring out all the raised detail on the black armor and make it look like it has been scratched up in a hundred battles.
I also painted the red missiles inside the pods here and drybrushed some rust on the horns and the hooves. It’s subtle, but you can see it in this picture, and like more subtle forms of shading, it looks better than without it even if it’s not immediately noticeable what you did.
One of the reasons why this kit is so sturdy and well put together, to be honest, is that it doesn’t have too many gimmicks. The only real big one is the turret on the back. All the cannons move individually, the hatch opens, the whole thing rotates and it can actually be removed completely with legs that fold out. No pictures because I don’t particularly like this feature and I don’t want to damage the paintjob. Like an idiot, I didn’t clearcoat any of this, if you can believe it, and frankly it’s a miracle that it’s still intact after several years and moving house once.
Note also that I painted those yellow stripes on the cannons and of course added soot to the muzzles. I’m actually not 100% sure how I did this anymore, I think I just smudged it on with q-tips. This was long before I had a proper airbrush.
Similar idea with these air intakes. I felt that they would be all grimed up, like jet engines on a dirty war plane, so I just smudged some black paint around until I got the desired effect. It’s really kind of cool what you can get with minimal tools and a bit of creativity.
Like the Gojulas after it, the Dibison has, um, brake lights, apparently. On its butt. Also, as you can see best here, I painted all of the rivets on the armor silver. They’re not all that difficult to get right with a small brush because they are raised very high, and the effect is quite striking.
The techniques I used on this kit are really all very simple – I cut the bristles on a brush down to half their length to make it stiffer and used that for the silver and rust drybrushing, and the rest is just some smudging and straightforward brushed details, i.e. the rivets and the yellow stripes on the guns. It’s been years now, but I’m still extremely happy with the result, probably more so than with some more recent stuff I’ve attempted because there aren’t any glaring mistakes here and everything came out the way I wanted it to look.
The kit, as you no doubt have guessed, is highly recommended. It’s a really simple build for an HMM, the end result is one of the sturdiest kits in the line, if not the sturdiest, it doesn’t have any inexplicable purple and maroon parts, and the detailing and overall proportions are just… perfect, really. I’m inclined to say this is better than the Tomy version, but I’d never type that out loud.
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