New Arrivals and Works in Progress

So after Christmas I decided (with some prodding from certain friends and family members) to pick up a kit and paint the whole thing myself. I ultimately decided to go with one of the big ver. ka's, and picked up the Full Armor Unicorn Gundam. I did this for several reasons, one being that the suit was totally white and would allow me to recolor it without any kind of bias toward a certain color scheme. The other reason being all the awesome weapons and accessories.

Well, while building and painting the kit (which has been extremely slow going due to weather), I started to feel slightly distressed about my decision to paint it. I'm not a very good painter, and I also started to think it would have been nice to have the Unicorn in its original white colors.

So I started thinking about what to do about this feeling that kept creeping into my head every time I thought about working on the kit. Should I buy a bunch of paint stripper and try to undo all the work I've already done? No, I do still actually like the color scheme I've started. Plus it would be an expensive way for me to admit outright failure -- if I could even get all of the paint off. So I started thinking of buying just a basic Unicorn gundam and having one in blue and one in white. I started shopping around, and found that they only come that way with the red psycho frame, which I like better than the green, but I wanted to make the shields swappable between the suits. So do I start stripping the paint off of the psycho-frame parts and try to swap those out? I may still do that, but there's about half of them already painted and assembled.

So I started shopping online for an alternate Unicorn and I think I found my best possible solution. I found that some people were still carrying the HD Color + MS Cage variation of the Unicorn, and for cheaper than the original price. I plopped down an extra $70 bucks on it, to go with the $80 FAUG, and the probably $60 worth of paint. But here's where I start to feel like everything is worth it...

Now I have 2 different versions of the suit and pretty much every possible accessory for it. The new kit comes with the MS Cage, which is probably the coolest hangar display stand ever created in the 1/100 scale. And with the old kit I get a plethora of weapons including 2 beam halberds, six gatling guns, and two bazookas, among others. Also with the old kit, I have a base-jabber, which is basically a transport vehicle for the gundam. So all-in-all, I can now recreate any scene I want from the OVA.

It still remains to be seen whether I try to swap out the psycho frames, but I'm leaning away from it at the moment. I really love the red-frame, and I'm starting to feel that the green on the shields won't clash too badly with it. We'll see what happens upon completion.