First off, I have to credit Youtuber Prime92 for the idea to do this repaint. She posted a tutorial video of how to mimick Bandai’s official titanium finish on an MG Sinanju by applying clear red over silver, and since it seemed simple enough, I wanted to give it a try. I think the more generally agreed upon term for this technique is candy, but it actually does look a lot like the factory coating you get on some model kits out of the box.

I’m generally better at pulling off rough paintjobs with lots of weathering, but if there’s a mobile suit that needs the trailer queen look, it’s definitely the Sinanju. It’s always looked like a sports car to me, and not just because the red screams “Ferrari.” Plus the glossy look fits the, shall-we-say, somewhat flamboyant character of its pilot.

As usual, I used Tamiya acrylics for everthing here – chrome silver for the base coat and three coats of clear red, topped off by two coats of TS-13 (gloss clear.) The good news is that the end result looks spectacular, and I didn’t find it particularly difficult to get the tones of the parts to match. This was a major issue with my PG Unicorn, so I was really worried, but I got it all to look very nice and uniform without much trouble.

The bad news is that for some reason, despite the double gloss top coat, this is the most fragile paintjob I’ve ever produced. I ended up scratching numerous parts when I finally snapped it all together, which was really frustrating because I had been more careful and thorough than ever before and I really liked the result. Ultimately you can’t really see most of the damage, and the kit certainly makes a fantastic display piece, but I’m still wondering what the problem is.

The clear red is definitely a difficult paint to work with and behaves strangely as it dries, so maybe it needed more time to cure before I topcoated it, or maybe it’s just Tamiya’s topcoats not being all that resistant to damage. I’ve had better results with Gunze’s topcoats, but those are much harder to come by and more difficult to work with.

Before I started, I tried out the process on a series of plastic spoons. From left to right, you can see what happens when you add coats of clear red; basically, the red becomes more saturated and slightly darker as you add more of it, but as you cover up the silver, it also becomes less reflective, so you kind of have to find the sweet spot that works for you. For me, it was three coats.

Before I move on to the finished product, here’s a few build pics for the three of you who read Gunpla blogs and haven’t built a Sinanju yet, and also because I just like to blather about this stuff.

The build starts with the chest, depicted here alongside the head for some reason. As you can see, I decided to paint on the gold trim instead of using the foil stickers because frankly, foil stickers are my #1 pet peeve with all of Gunpla and there was just no way I was going to use them. Hand painting the trim turned out to be more difficult than I thought, though, mostly because the details aren’t raised very high, so you end up either not filling in the edges completely or painting over them a lot. Sadly, the top coat also seems to have eaten some of the gold, and I really have no idea why. It didn’t pool at all, so I don’t think I sprayed it on too thick, and I did let the paint cure overnight.

If you’re wondering why I didn’t do the reverse wash that people generally recommend for this, it’s because frankly, I don’t trust painting techniques that lie beyond a certain degree of chemistry mumbo-jumbo. Every single time I’ve tried anything that relied on substance Y reacting in a certain way to substance X, like being “easy to wipe off” whatever’s underneath it, I’ve run into problems, and I wasn’t going to risk it here. I know that’s just me being weird, but I never said I wasn’t weird.

What you can also see here is that, for the first time, I decided to paint some inner frame parts, or at least most of what’s still visible once the armor’s on. I had never done this before because I always thought that on all those moving parts, the paint would just get damaged anyway. But in this case, it was clear that the dull, unpainted plastic would look unacceptable next to the painted armor. The funny part is that I really tried to limit myself to what’s definitely visible, which you’d think is almost nothing, and I still ended up with something north of 50 parts that needed to be painted. But it was all worth it in the end, and you’re not going to see any more Gunpla from me with unpainted inner frames, even if it’s just a simple coat or two of gunmetal like I did here.

 

Next is the head. The monoeye is actually molded in clear green, as are all the other clear parts, but it’s a very light color, so I decided to paint it green on the inside to make it pop more. You really have to look at the head from below to see the eye once it’s all put together, but it does show up very clearly if you look at it from the right angle. Unlike on the RG, you also have to paint the vulcans, which is one of those small touches where you get a huge improvement for a few minutes’ worth of effort.

The arms and hands are next. You may remember I spent ample time complaining about the arms on the RG Sinanju – this kit has none of those issues. The arms are rock-solid without sacrificing any poseability, as you can see. Sadly, I didn’t notice the moving pistons in the elbows when I was thumbing through the instructions and deciding what parts to paint, so only the large elbow halves are painted. The big sphere-shaped joint at the top is unpainted on purpose – I know people like to paint these, but to me it just looks like a scratched paintjob waiting to happen. Maybe I’ll try it on a future kit, we’ll see. Here they’re basically invisible anyway.

 

I was pretty enamored with the hands when I built them; only the index finger is completely separate, the first segment of the other three fingers is actually one solid piece, but as you can see, you can get very convincing expressive poses out of them – it’s barely noticeable that the fingers aren’t “real”. This seemed like the best compromise between nice looking fixed pose hands and the super-poseable but ugly hands on contemporary MG and PG kits at first, but then I tried to get them to hold the weapons, and yeah… not so much. That shallow little slot for the peg on the gun handles basically does nothing.

Also, I left these unpainted because I really don’t see how any paintjob on all these balljoints and moving parts is going to stay intact for more than two seconds, but looking at the finished kit, I kind of wish I’d done it anyway. Honestly, though, that’s just one more reason I prefer fixed pose hands. Just give me a trigger finger hand, I’ll paint it, slap it on the gun and never remove it again. Done.

Obviously you build the shoulder plates next and then attach everything to the torso. And here we have one of my few moments of frustration with this build.

 

See, when I cut those spikes loose from the sprues, it somehow didn’t occur to me that I would have a difficult time figuring out which one goes where on the shoulder armor, but it turned out that this was harder than I thought, and the fact that I had painted both the spikes and the part that they’re mounted on meant that the asymmetrical shape of the pegs and holes, which is supposed to help with this, also became difficult to see. I ended up fiddling with this so much that I scratched the red paintjob in a lot of places. I could go back and fix this, but it would require painting all over everything because you can’t just touch it up, and there are scratches elsewhere on the kit as well by now.

 

The legs are really fun to build. There are these layers of overlapping armor that fit together really nicely, and it’s just super-satisfying to see it come together. A word of warning if you haven’t built a Sinanju yet, though – parts fit here is precise, but unusually tight, and I ended up scratching the edges of a few armor bits because they rubbed against each other when I attached them. Nothing visible because it got covered up by other armor pieces, but I wasn’t a happy camper when this happened, and with hindsight, some of it could have been avoided. Pay close attention to how the parts go on and how you can attach them with minimal friction.

The one section that really gave me trouble, surprisingly, is the waist. Those parts that attach the tubes to the front skirts just wouldn’t fit, and I’m still not sure if it’s a parts fit problem or if the paintjob caused it. Ultimately I ended up reaming the hole on one of those black armor pieces and just supergluing the end of the tube in there, but it’s never fun having to mess with parts this much when they’re painted. Otherwise the waist section is fine, and the skirts don’t pop off randomly like they do on so many other kits.

And here’s the finished product sans accessories. Like with the RG, I’m kind of amazed it stands up so well with the backpack attached. I’m not sure how that’s physically possible, but… well, it works. The kit does have these movable hip joints whose purpose completely eludes me, and I moved them all the way to the back because I expected balance issues. I couldn’t tell you if it stands up this well with the hip joints moved to the front, but then again I also couldn’t tell you why you’d want to do that.

You’ll notice I didn’t put any decals on – I didn’t think it would look good, and I was also more than a little concerned about damage to the paintjob, especially applying dry-rub decals.

And yes, that is Star Trek: TOS on the TV back there.

So, accessories. You get the rifle and the grenade launcher, two beam sabers, two beam axes with long and short effect parts, and if you buy the OVA version, you also get a bazooka. Unless I’m forgetting something, that makes the OVA MG the only version of the Sinanju that actually comes with a bazooka, and before I got it, that was kind of a big deal to me. Having built it now, though, I’m not so sure anymore. Not because of the bazooka itself, which is a really cool weapon, but it’s hard to get any good poses with it, and frankly, it just looks too bulky for the suit. I really prefer the rifle’s sleeker shape.

 

As you can see, I painted the weapons mostly silver and gunmetal, as I usually do, with a few gold accents to repeat colors from the suit. I thought about adding some red, similar to what I did on the PG Unicorn, but for this particular kit, I actually thought it would be better if the armor color was limited to the suit and the weapons looked more like they had just been picked up at the armory, rather than extensions of the suit itself.

The rifle and bazooka combine into this massive contraption, which seemed like a really cool gimmick in theory, but it’s even bulkier than just the bazooka and I found that I really didn’t like it much. It’s also just about impossible to get the suit to actually hold the thing because of the problems mentioned above. You can get the peg to lock into its slot if you take the hand off the arm, and then when you reattach it all, the handle comes loose again.

If you’re going to use this weapon configuration, you’ll want to decide on your colors with this specifically in mind – I like how my bazooka and rifle came out individually, but if you combine them like this, there’s way too much of the same gunmetal, and it badly needs something else in there to break things up a little.

 

This pose with the beam rifle pointing upwards is the best way I’ve figured out to display the kit with one of its weapons. The gun is actually being held in place by the elbow and the hand here because the peg, she do nothin’. Looks cool, though, so I’m fine with it.

What you can also see here is that I painted the camera lens the same way as the mono-eye. The effect’s pretty striking, I’m happy to report, and it goes very well with the gold parts.

 

Here he is with the bazooka. Like I said above, it’s a really cool looking weapon, but it just doesn’t really fit all that well with the suit. I guess you could argue that the contrast between the angular look of the bazooka and the curvy armor on the Sinanju helps emphasize the latter, but to me it just looks kind of mismatched. Not to mention I was in abject terror of scratching the shoulder armor while I posed the kit for this picture.

 

And finally, since I forgot to document this during the build, here’s a shot of the booster pack. As you can see, I painted the white parts chrome silver and the little vents on the fuel tanks gunmetal. I did the chrome silver straight over the white because I wanted it to look as bright as possible without actually being white.

That’s it for pose pictures, folks. I handled the kit with latex gloves for these, but I was terrified the entire time that I’d nick and scratch the paintjob more than it already is. The inner frame is also very stiff, which is normally a good thing, but the amount of pressure I had to use on the limbs to pose them scared the bejeezus out of me. I should probably also mention that the candy finish doesn’t quite translate to pictures. For some reason the flaking of the chrome silver underneath appears much stronger in pictures and the highlights get this weird orange tint to them. You’ll just have to take my word for it that it looks much more like an even chrome red in real life.

Oh, one more pic before I go…

This is the Unicorn shelf in my display case. The whole point of building these three kits was that I wanted to display them this way – the PG in destroy mode, the MG to show off unicorn mode (which, I have to reiterate, I think is underrated), and the Sinanju because… because it’s the frickin’ Sinanju, what more reason do I need? Incidentally, the paintjob looks closer to what it’s actually like in this picture, by the way. I guess bad lighting would’ve been the trick?

Anyway, the MG Sinanju is one of the most popular master grade kits out there, and it’s with good reason – this is a near perfect kit. The build is fun and interesting without being needlessly difficult or fiddly, and the end result strikes a great balance between poseability and sturdiness. Other than the difficulties with getting it to hold its weapons, I’ve had zero issues with parts popping off on this kit, and I do mean zero. That doesn’t happen with master grade kits. And the thing looks fantastic. I’m completely in love with my paintjob, of course, but I’m pretty sure it would look great if you just snapped it together and put the decals on. Honestly, if you’re into Gunpla, this one’s a must-have. Me, I’m already tempted to get another one and paint it differently.