🦁 woxi

After working on it every day since Sunday, I finished last night! I'm so happy with it! 🥰

My second MG, and my first ever paintjob. It was a super cool build, and the painting was a ton of fun. I learned a lot as I went, redid and adjusted stuff, but never ran into any big roadblocks! The whole thing was just super exciting the whole way through, hence why I was liveblogging it every day out of excitement LOL. I'm definitely gonna do more paintjobs in the future, especially since there's way too little purple to be found on most kits... 😉 I need more purple on my shelf.

Progress shots and words under this silly image of Roux that I drew to channel my excitement.

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Planning

I threw together my color mockup weeks ago. After impulse-buying an MG Barbatos, when I'd just acquired an FM Barbatos Lupus Rex the day before, I decided I was going to paint the MG. I wanted to differentiate my two 1/100 Barbatos more, and I'd been wanting to do a paintjob for a while. Of course, it had to be purple! I played around a bit with more all-encompassing color schemes, but in the end I thought just having the purples as highlights like this and leaving a lot of white looked the best. Not coloring every single part of the kit would make it easier as a learning experience too.

I stuck to this color distribution and didn't make any changes to it. The colors did end up pretty different from my mockup though, the paints I got were more on the grape purple end. But I actually ended up liking the final colors more than my mockup! 😊 I think the warmer purple suits Barbatos really well, but I definitely wanna paint a kit with a more cool purple too sometime soon.

Painting

The paints I used were... Cheap acrylics from the hobby store LOL. I researched a little bit, asked questions in a Discord, and ended up feeling confident about doing it like this. I dabbed the paint on using makeup sponges, and it was super effective! I just did a layer at a time until I was satisfied with the color coverage, and then at the end did a gloss varnish coat with the same method. The yellow and brighter purple were just straight from the tube, but the darker purple I had to blend. It ended up drying darker than I intended, but I don't dislike the result.

As you can see if you compare the two photos, I was silly and painted the wrong sides of the shoulderpads at first... But when washing the paint off to do the other side instead, I thought the purple left in the panel lines looked really good, so from there I decided I was going to panel line all the white pieces with purple. 🔥 My method was to just sloppily apply a coat of purple on top of any areas with lines I wanted colored with a brush or toothpick, wait for it to dry, and then just file off excess with toothpicks. The result is a bit rough, and I struggled to get some areas lined, but the overall effect is great. Having extra purple lines everywhere really adds to it!

Here are some in-progress build photos

Overall this was just a really fun build. I really love the frame on IBO mechs, and watching this skeleton come together was so cool. I didn't have any particular issues with any part of the assembly, and the final thing feels so sturdy and articulate despite the complicated inner details! My only nitpick with the kit is how difficult it is to angle the gun so that you get it both attached to a hand as well as being connected to the backpack. 😅 Took like 10 minutes of fiddling! But once it's on there, it looks really good and feels pretty secure, so I can't complain too seriously.

Aaaaand finish!

The final result is just. Amazing!! I'm SO happy with this thing, it looks so good!! 😭 Months ago the thought of a paintjob felt so intimidating, but it's amazing the result you can get just with basic acrylics. It may not be the most professional job, but it works! And there he is! This guy lights up my shelf so much, I feel giddy just looking at him! 🥰 Here he is next to Turn A✨✨✨ This isn't actually what the shelf looks like right now IRL, I have the FM Lupus Rex in there too and it's super crowded haha. I need to add some more shelf inserts in my detolf because the two levels dedicated to robots that I have now have once again become full, so I need to add a third one LOL.

Thank you everyone who has followed me on this journey this week. :) I've had so much fun, I've been so excited coming home from work every day. Now I'm going to take a rest from building for a bit... And then it's gonna be a painted HG Calibarn next up!