2012 may not be over but my latest project, the 1/35 Hard Graph Semovente tank from Gundam’s Universal Century’s, has been wrapped up.

[flickr-photo:id=8327533109,size=n]

As usual, my blabbering about the project first and the rest of the pictures are down below.

Overall she was fairly quick build, the first coat of paint went on Nov 30th/Dec 1st sometime. The tank is a huge beauty featuring sturdy construction and a ton of detail. There’s so much detail on this that it puts a lot of normal gunpla kits to shame. Welds, stippled areas, and hatch hinges and clasps galore. I understand why folks love to build model tanks. For me, however, it was bit detour from what I generally do. At first it was odd working with such large and small pieces but it’s easy to get a hand of. Unfortunately it’s a lot easier to apply too thick a coat at a one time so I had some bleeding around parts of my camo masking. I didn’t want to do anything too traditional whether it be the desert tans colour is designed in or forest greens. At first I thought of doing a dark grey theme styled after some German WWII tanks but instead went with a custom blue grey colour, imagining a tank sneaking around in a foggy British winter. I left a bunch of tools off the kit, along with the scale figures. Maybe one day I’ll have the room to build a diorama so they’ll be stashed away until then. read more

After about 20 days of work my Semovente is ready for weathering. For the most part things went well. The colour scheme looks okay and aside from a few areas where my paint coats were too thick the digital camo looks pretty good. Paint went well on everything else. I did lose a few pieces somehow, including a bit of handle bar that goes on the rear of the kit. I may try to recreate it if I can find some piping thin enough but I’ll likely just pretend it never existed in the first place 😉 read more