Those of you who follow this blog regularly should probably both know that I will be repeating some things here that I already talked about in the WIP updates and on Youtube – the only thing that’s new is the Aile Striker and a few more accessories. So you might want to scroll down to that part, although I do have a few new pics along the way.

My usual philosophy is always to try something new on every build, but with this one I took a slightly different approach. For a number of reasons, among them the fact that it’s a frickin’ PG and complicated enough as it is, I decided to treat this more as a milestone build and just throw every technique I’ve learned over the past year and a half at it. Things I know will work, basically. That’s why, for example, the color scheme is the same as on the Master Grade Mk-II – that’s my personal version of the Gundam colors, I know I like the way it looks, and so I used it again here.

I still ended up doing a few somewhat new things – that just seems to happen kind of inevitably. I’ve never actually done a gunkwash over pre-shading, or on any painted Gunpla, for example, or this much detail painting on the inner frame, or this much masking. But that’s just more of familiar things or combinations of techniques that I’d used before.

The general process here was basically the way I approached the RX 78-2. I painted and weathered the armor first, then took it all off again for topcoating, and dismantled and painted the inner frame.

After priming, I pre-shaded the white and off-white armor pieces with light grey and the red ones with black. The blue pieces were primed black, painted flat and then highlighted with my own custom mix of blue and green that I’ve used before on the Mk-II.

The big news here is that I really think this one is the build where I finally got my preshading dialed in. As you’d expect with anything airbrush-related, most of it had to do with mixing ratios. I figured out that I needed to thin the shading paint much more than I usually would so that it would spray evenly at low pressures and not give me specks all over the place, and then just be, y’know, really really careful not to produce any spidering because the paint was so thin. If you’ve been following this blog, you should know that preshading has been sort of an ongoing struggle for me – I’ve always loved that heavily preshaded Japanese style of painting, but I could just never quite get it right, so getting the look I wanted, and on a complex kit like this, is really satisfying.

Anyway, after the pre-shading, I sprayed my usual custom mix of Tamiya’s red and red brown over the red parts for that muted look, white for the white parts and a mix of white with a few drops of light grey for the off-white.

The next step was a gloss coat and then waterslides. Because Bandai refuses to make waterslides for their PGs, I had to resort to third party again, but I’m very happy to report that the ones I used here, from DL, turned out to be almost as good as Bandai’s. The print quality is excellent, they’re pre-cut with razor-sharp precision, and they’re very easy to work with. Although that’s partly due to their one downside, which is that the carrier film is just a teensy bit too thick for my tastes. That means it’s easier to move the decals around and not have them crumple up and fold in on themselves, but they just don’t look quite as painted on as Bandai’s.

After decals came another gloss coat and then a gunk wash with Abteilung 502’s Starship Filth. Here I ran into my first real problem with this build. Like on the Storm Sworder before, the surface quality of the gloss coat wasn’t quite as slick as it should have been on all the parts, and I was more concerned with not filling up the panel lines, so I didn’t fix it. Turns out that on light colors, the difference in how the oil paint tints the color when you wipe it off becomes more pronounced, and it also became an issue that the shaded and plain areas had different surface qualities that still poked through the topcoat. I was able to fix this more or less by using a little oil paint thinner on those pieces where the paint wouldn’t wipe off as much as I wanted to, so I ended up with reasonably uniform shades of white and off-white, but it did affect how much of the Starship Filth remained in the panel lines and crevices, and so now the panel lines aren’t as uniform as I would’ve liked them to be. Not a huge issue because gunk washed panel lines definitely read more like a weathering effect and thus shouldn’t be entirely uniform anyway, but definitely a lesson learned for future builds.

After the gunk wash came another top coat, and then I could finally slap the armor back on the still unpainted inner frame to see what it all looked like.

And it’s a good thing I did because seeing it all put together like this, you really notice that between the preshading and the gunk wash, it already looks very faded and worn, and you could really leave it like that. I had already resolved at the start of this build that I wasn’t going to weather the kit as heavily as I usually do, but this test assembly made me restrain myself even more. In fact, I still like this look so much that I’m probably going to paint another kit like this soon and not do any further weathering.

So I did the usual, just less of it. First I drybrushed all the edges with the base colors for highlights, and then I went back to chipping with a detail brush instead of drybrushing all over the place. I’d previously done this successfully on the Gun Sniper and, let’s say, less successfully on the RX 78-2, but it was clear that the drybrushed approach was going to be too much here. I only drybrushed scratches in a few places like on the feet or around the shoulder joints where I thought more wear and tear would occur, the rest is all done with a tiny brush and lots of patience. I must say I’m pretty pleased with how it came out, although of course it’s also a bit easier on a larger scale kit.

The colors were the usual – Tamiya chrome silver for the red and blue, gunmetal for the white and a few dabs of Gunze’s rust here and there. Then I drybrushed the customary heat streaks around all the vents and the head vulcans and added just a small handful of rust streaks with Vallejo’s Dark Rust and diluted india ink, basically to some of the bigger chips that I had previously added a dot of rust to as well. When I decided to add a bit of Vallejo’s Engine Grease to have grime streaking out of the knee joints, I started to run into trouble (the streaks on the left shin are much more than I wanted), so I took that as my sign to stop. Well, actually, I also sponged some Tamiya Brown/Light Grey on the feet and then stopped. I did mention I repeated almost every single technique I know here, right?

Here are a few pictures of weathering details from the finished build. Obviously this was after I’d also painted the inner frame. With just the armor painted, it looked like this.

And then I had to take it all apart for topcoating and to finally paint that inner frame. First I snapped a series of reference pictures, though, so I would remember which parts of the inner frame would be visible; I did want to do a fair bit of detail painting, but I had no intention of doing a full paintjob on the inner frame just so I could take a few pictures and then hide it under the armor forever. It’s awesome when other people do that, but it really just bugs me when I spend a lot of time on stuff that I then can’t display, even if I’m almost the only one who ever looks at my shelves anyway.

The general approach with the inner frame was first to settle on a relatively simple color scheme – gunmetal over black primer as the base color, then chrome silver, gold leaf and red for details. There are a tiny handful of parts that I base painted in silver or gold, but almost everything was painted gunmetal. Then I made sure I painted similar looking details in similar colors; gold for pistons and round screw-like parts, silver for raised panels, and red for smaller tubing and a few recessed squares that I decided might be lights. Finally, I drybrushed everything silver on the gunmetal and white on the gold and silver, plus rust on everything.

As you can see, the end result was that it gives a nice sense of depth and detail to the inner frame where it shows through the armor plates, and a few cool effects with mechanical detail being revealed as the joints are moved, especially in the knees. The legs in general I’d say are not only my favorite part of this kit engineering wise, but also where I probably did the best job with the details, but it was also easier because there’s so much cool stuff to work with.

Another new trick I learned here was to paint the frame in sections; I did the torso first and then one limb at a time. This allowed me to keep one limb completely assembled as I worked on the other one, so it was much easier to see what goes where and how it should be painted. I don’t know if I’m going to repeat this approach on the next MG I build, but for something this complicated, it really helped.

And then I could finally slap the armor back on and put it all together.

And that brings me to what you all know it brings me to – accessories.

With the base PG Strike kit, you get the beam rifle, the shield, the Grand Slam sword and the Armor *snicker* Schneiders. The beam sabers are included with the Skygrasper/Aile Striker kit, so I tossed them in this picture here.

I painted the inside of the rifle gunmetal with a few silver details here and there, especially the barrel, which needed to be masked. The outer casing is the same blue over black with highlights, drybrushing and a gunk wash as on the suit, just with a lot more drybrushing because I thought the weapons would have more wear and tear. The camera is clear red on the outside and silver on the inside, and I did the usual soot/heat streaking around the muzzle. I’m thinking on a future build I’ll try actual heat discoloration, but you know what the theme for this one was.

The shield is the same red and white with pre-shading as on the suit, titanium gold for the yellow parts and gunmetal with a few silver details for all the mechanical stuff, including a few details and the handle at the top that I painted at the end, as usual, to keep them shiny. As you can see, the inside of the shield is gunkwashed with a lot less cleanup than I usually do to give it this dirty appearance. There’s also pre-shading under there, but you can barely see it anymore.

The mechanisms for the moving handle and the small blast shield were a bit of a problem. I left the clip the handle attaches to unpainted, but it’s so tight now that I don’t really want to move it anymore. And the blast shield was hard to move before the shield was painted, so I knew I’d have to sand it down a good bit, but even after doing that and a lot of test fitting before I assembled everything, it’s still hard to move.

Oh yeah, and the clear part in the… I dunno, the peephole, has the same light grey sponged-on dirt I usually do on canopies.

Since I don’t particularly care for the Grand Slam sword and the Armor *snicker* Schneiders, I kind of broke with the theme for this build and used them as an opportunity to experiment a little.

The tennis sword, of course, comes with a chrome coated blade, and once I had painted the handle and put it back together, it became 100% clear that it looked unacceptable. Bandai’s mekki plating is nice and all, but next to properly painted parts, it just still looks too toylike.

That left me with the problem of having to strip the plating off the part, which I’d never done before. After two failed attempts with bleach and a mild degreaser, I bought a bottle of concentrated car degreaser from the local hardware store, soaked the blade in the stuff for a few hours and poof, gone was the chrome coating with zero damage to the part. I’m really glad to finally have found a product that does this for me, and I’m thinking I’ll use it to strip paint in the future as well.

Then I primed the blade with Vallejo’s gloss black primer that I’d discovered while I was working on this build and thus hadn’t used elsewhere.

And then I decided to just try some silly stuff and see what it’d look like. I also bought a few of Vallejo’s Metal Color paints to experiment with, but I decided to stick with the Tamiyas so it wouldn’t clash too much with the other metallic stuff on the kit (which is dumb and I’m dumb for doing this dumb thing, I’m just explaining my reasoning.) But instead of just painting it straight chrome silver, which seems like the obvious thing to do, I first painted the whole blade gunmetal, then added a gradient of gold leaf from the hilt, then a thin coat of chrome silver on top. This ended up doing exactly what I’d hoped it would, which was the illusion of an iridescent surface; you can’t quite tell what color it is because the lighter areas with the gold underneath seem to be that way because they’re catching the light, but they’re actually not.

But of course that looked too pristine, so I drybrushed all over the blade with silver, titanium gold, gunmetal, white and rust to make it look all beat up. It kind of ended up taking away the iridescent effect, and now it looks more like it’s so worn that you can’t tell what color it is anymore, which is also fine.

In fact, I now like this sword so much that it kind of sucks that I can’t use it.

The armor tailors, as I’ve complained about before, are a problem because they come pre-assembled on the same sprue as the hands, which makes it unnecessarily hard to paint them. When you really think about it, though, even if the blades were separate pieces, the first time you fold them, you’d scratch half the paint off of them anyway, so it really doesn’t matter.

Now I could’ve masked the handles and airbrushed the blades, but I had just picked up some Citadel paints and decided to give those a try instead. After all, the worst thing that could happen was that I’d ruin an accessory that I wasn’t going to use anyway. The only reason I painted these in the first place was because the idea of not having painted everything that came with the kit bugged me.

So I used Lead Belcher, which seems to be sort of the go-to silver color in the Citadel range, on the blades and the detail on the handles. I have to say this stuff is almost as good as I hoped it would be. It still takes about three coats to get a good even finish and you still have to be careful to get the thinning ratio just right, but it’s a hell of a lot easier to do than with Tamiya acrylics, and the end result looks about as close to airbrushed as any hand painted surface is ever going to look.

Not much to say about the beam saber handles. The part that I guess you’d call the cross-guard is nicely detailed, so I painted those parts gunmetal, and I did the usual heat streaks (because beam saber blades cause heat streaking because science and no, I’m not going to stop running this joke into the ground), and of course they’re pre-shaded, gunkwashed and chipped.

You might also notice in the picture that the paint is basically stripped towards where the effect part plugs in – that’s because the slots they fit into on the Aile Striker are too tight. I may go back and remedy that with modding, given that I have a second complete Aile Striker kit, but for now, um, yeah.

As for the effect parts, I had that same reaction to them as I did with the Grand Slam blade where it suddenly bugged me how toylike they looked in unpainted form, so…

The original idea was to paint them clear yellow at the bottom, but that didn’t work at all. Lighter clear paint on darker clear parts does basically nothing. So I added a gradient of lemon yellow instead and kept it very light so as to not go fully opaque, and that worked very well.

I then painted the tips blue – the idea was to have a gradient from a warm to a cool color here, basically, and while that makes sense in theory, I kind of feel like the purple that resulted from painting the tips makes the parts look a bit too much like candy. I’ll probably do the yellow at the bottom again, but no more blue on the tip.

And that’s our opportunity for another pose gallery. I think the only thing I have to say here is that if you don’t want to shell out the extra bucks for the Aile Striker kit, you’ll still get a heck of a PG with the Strike.

But as far as this build’s concerned, saying that is just my segue into talking about the Aile Striker.

Now the first thing I needed to figure out was something I had basically been putting off since I originally snap built the suit itself. Back then, I promised myself that I would snap it together before I started painting anything to make sure I had a clear plan for the color scheme. Well, I didn’t. And what I’d never figured out was what to do with these dark grey parts that are molded in more or less in the same color as the inner frame of the suit.

One thing I considered was gunmetal, but that would have raised a whole host of problems with glossy and matte surfaces right next to one another, and I also thought it didn’t really make sense for the outer hull here to be the same color as the inner frame elsewhere. So I ultimately settled on black, despite the fact that I hadn’t used black anywhere else on the kit.

Now that in itself was fine, but now I had to figure out how to weather this stuff. What I’d normally do with black is just drybrush silver all over it, but that results in a much more heavily weathered look than what I wanted here. So after some experimenting on spoons, I decided to do a gunkwash instead, with Abteilung 502’s Ghost Grey. That’s how I got these bluish-grey panel lines and the accumulated dirt in the recesses that you see here.

That was followed by edge highlights with Tamiya light grey and some chipping.

Now as you can see here, I also did some masking to add color separation. I have to say if there’s one disappointment I have with these two kits, it’s the lack of complexity in the Aile Striker (and the Skygrasper, for that matter.) Its proportions are about as perfect as they possibly could be, but just out of the box the lack of color separation makes it look really bland and toy-like. So I just painted some of the detail in the same red as everywhere else.

The rest was fairly straightforward and just followed the color scheme and weathering steps of the suit itself, really. I also added a few extra decals to break things up, and of course the position lights on the wings are painted with clear paints. No silver on the inside because I figured it’d just scrape off when I attach the parts.

And with that, the build was finally complete, at least until I decide to make the base more interesting.

I really feel like this is my best build yet by quite a large margin. There are mistakes and things I’d do differently if I could do it again, but the overall result is about as close to what I wanted as it could have been. I’m especially happy about the fact that I pulled off the more restrained approach to weathering that I wanted to take here, and seeing the result of that has definitely taught me a lot about how important it is to apply weathering in moderation and how the different stages complement one another. And as for the “milestone” approach, it’s probably not that surprising that I still ended up having to try new things.

Now as I’m writing this, I’ve already got a list of new techniques in my head that I want to try, and old ones that I want to go back to and give another whirl, so while I may have been a bit worried that throwing everything in my toolbox at one build would end up make me feel burnt out, it’s actually done the opposite. I dunno, guys, there’s just nothing negative about this build, it’s been an absolute blast working on this, and it’s made me a better modeler and hungry for more. I hope you all at least get a kick out of looking at the pictures.