MG Wing Gundam My current work in progress. Nice kit that happens to be one of the cheapest MG kits available. My wife doesn’t like the standard Gundam color palette (RBYW), so I had to make sure that this one didn’t look “the same” as all the other ones on the shelf.
As someone coming from the mini wargaming space do you folks ever paint your models or is all the joy in parts assembly?
Yes, and they look fabulous!
I’ve been fairly busy lately and haven’t been building Gunpla at all, but when I do I usually custom-paint them.
For instance, here’s a Jesta Cannon that I repainted and mildly customized (replaced the head and weapon) to reflect a hypothetical scenario where Kai Shiden gets back into a mobile suit some time after Unicorn.
Here’s one I made more recently of what Justin Fox’s (a Canadian Gunpla builder who’s name is seen in the tournament brackets in Gundam Build Fighters but who never actually appears on-screen) mobile suit might look like, with a colour scheme inspired by the fact that he was knocked out of the playoffs in the first round (I suppose if he competed again this year he might make it to round two.) It used a Gundam Barbataurus as a base, but included a lot of customizing, basically with the goal of using up as many of the spare parts I had laying around as possible.
Depends on the kit for me, usually. For MG kits the color separation tends to be pretty accurate already anyway, so unless I’m doing a custom paint job (like the Wing Zero Snow White I posted a while back) I tend to leave the external colors alone, but paint the pilot minis. For HG and SD kits that don’t have the same degree of color separation, though, I’ll add paint to try to replicate the intended color scheme.
99% of my builds have some kind of extra detail work, even if it’s just panel lining. But most have paint too.
The majority of my builds are custom painted. That said, I also enjoy the building process, and I really enjoy kitbashing.