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WIth December coming closer, I thought it’s about time I start the kit I put aside specially for the contest. It would have been the new RX-78-2, but by the time contest was announced I already had that built and had photos posted online. So this will be something totally different, yet just as classic: VF-1S Valkyrie kit in Roy Focker colors with Super parts. This is is pretty much the same kit as previously released VF-1A/S in Hikaru Ichijyo colors, except that the markings are yellow with black instead of red with black, and it lacks both Lynn Minmay figure and VF-1A head parts.

This is is a straight build with panel lining and a some touch up painting with Gundam markers (like pilot). Some comments to the photos below:

Panel lining is done on the runners, as it’s easier to do that way. I’m using Tamiya’s black Panel Line Accent, but much more sparingly than Bryan did on Hobbylink.tv. The brush in the bottle is slightly longer than the space, so you’ll get a slight spike to the side at the end of the brush. This spike allows you drop paint into the crevises with high accuracy, and with practice there will be very few spills for you to clean up. I use toothpicks to clean up all excess paint from panel lines.

Pilot figure requires glue to connect hands and head to body. Tamiya Limonene Cement took long to dry but parts hold together. And don’t spill that thing – you’ll have your room smell like lemons for a couple of days. Pilot was painted directly with marker, so not much precision painting there. I painted the sides of the body and inside of the hands before gluing them together.

Note that I apply stickers as soon as I get a part completed. This way it’s much easier since other parts of the kit don’t get in the way. More so, manual directly tells you to apply some the stickers (e.g. on wings) during the assembly. Stickers that come with the kit are not typical Bandai gunpla stickers. These are similar to those that were used to add color variation on Nu Gundam ver. Ka from last December. They are thicker and they can stretch. So I used a toothpick to push the stickers into the panel lines. That way stickers don’t hide these nice panel lines.

There are lots of stickers on that kit, so look for good places to start from so that you have some geometry to help you align the sticker correctly. For cockpit this is a joint hole at the back. For wings – start from base and move towards the tip. For stabilizers – this is the corner of the panel line (corner of the 2nd line from the front edge and the top line)

This kit also uses quite a lot of small iron shafts to connect various parts. These come in 4 bags:
1 green bag with 1 small and one long shaft – to be used when building cockpit
1 yellow bag with 2 small shafts – to be used when building the tail section.
2 yellow bags with 3 small shafts – one for each shoulder joint
Make sure you don’t loose these shafts – they are used in vital joints.

All in all steps shown in attached photos took me about 7.5 hours to complete. About 30 minutes for panel lining, another 30 for painting and gluing the pilot together, rest is building the kit.

Another session’s ahead where I’ll build hands, legs and head.