Archive for the ‘Mecha’ Tag
The Wave 1/24 VOTOMS kits are some seriously venerable pieces of plastic, reissued throughout the years with some occasional improvements. Out of the box, they are decently posable and have a bit chubby proportions, but are easy to build and can be vastly improved with a little TLC. I have seen many Scopedogs kitted out in Hobby Japan magazine with new articulation, adjustments to the proportions, and serious detail upgrades, so I wanted to try such an affair for myself. Adler’s Nest is a small firm that makes turned brass and aluminum gun barrels and hardware for scale models (tanks), and they for some reason also make a Scopedog gun barrel from turned brass and aluminum, as well as replacement machined aluminum eye cameras in the main VOTOMS scales (1/24, 1/18, 1/12 I think). I used the gun barrels and eye camera on this build, as well as a set of brass tubing smoke dischargers I made myself, and turned aluminum jet exhausts for the roller dash boosters. I also rebuilt most of the articulation from new parts to improve the articulation on the kit, especially on the shoulders, hips, wrists, and ankles. By the time I was done I also added some extra sensor bits to the visor (to work in a tight urban environment), some non-canon weld beads, stowage, and some etched metal details. With the new articulation, the Scopedog can hold its rifle realistically and be in some convincing ‘roller skating’ poses like the Turbo Customs do in the anime.
The paint scheme is a really ugly one I found while doing tank research, an urban disruptive scheme known as the ‘Berlin Brigade’ scheme. It features rectangular drab colors, and black paint straight across the lower portions of the machine (typically the running gear on an AFV) to try and blend in with both the urban structures and road. I filled out my Scopedog with a gamut of decals, and marked this guy as a special Red Shoulder unit, and threw in some battle damage to indicate he’s been campaigning for a while and has seen some heat.
In Armored Troopers: VOTOMS (Vertical One-man Tank for Offensive Maneuvers), Fyana is the early show antagonist and mysterious Phantom Lady, who pilots the powerful Brutishdog custom machine. The Brutishdog is a fearsome design, armed with its massive rotary cannon and brutal shearing claw, with an upgraded roller dash system for enhanced speed and maneuverability.
I finished this kit about a year ago and somehow never got around to photographing it (and a companion piece to come later). I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with the excellent Bandai 1/20 VOTOMS plamo kits. On one hand, they are the most detailed and best articulated VOTOMS kits ever produced, but at the same time, they have a dearth of moving parts and are a bit delicate when painted up without care. I have broken a couple of the armor flaps after handling this kit for a year, but it is still one of my favorite models, and the kit really is solid, even if there is a large amount of stuff on the kit that got painted and will never be seen again on the interior and structural skeleton.
The regular pink and off-white Brutishdog has always seemed a bit boring to me, so I wanted to spice up the design with this kit. I added a two-tone pink disruptive scheme to add some interest, along with a large number of decals and some really controlled weathering to depict Fyana in her element, blowing up machines and roller-dashing rings around her enemies. If I ever get around to detailing up my Yamato 1/12 Brutishdog, I will finish it the exact same way.
Just messing around with some new acquisitions… Takara’s 1/72 dual-model Dougram figures. Die-cast skeletons with plastic armor parts and fantastic articulation and detail make for a win in my book.
Vinyl figures conquer the shelves! Phil Reed’s (from Battlegrip.com) gonna hate this update… he’s currently trying to keep himself from falling off the vinyl cliff, and here I am pushing just about every robot toy I own out of the way for more vinyl! I’ve got standard-sized Kaiju up the wazoo… I’ve got a separate space for unpainted M1 Kaiju, sort of as holding area for them, and then a Max Toy Co shelf, with more Neo Eyezons on the way, and an ‘everything else’ standard-sized shelf. On the bottom is the Real X Head shelf… I’ve been having alot of fun seeing all the different colorways out there… especially in the Chaos family. Of note are the two Mark Nagata handpaints, Toybot Studios Rock and Roll Kemur Seijin, the SDCC Goto-san painted Drazoran, M1 Lucky Bag Red Ultraman, and the awesome Superfest Kikaida paint-scheme Chaos Adult.
Edit: threw a fight pic on the end.
The Bigaos is a rarely-seen combination of the Chaos body and Bigaro head, created by Akro-kaiser and the evil Mutants. I always liked the heavily-armored looking Bigaos combination, and made my own from beige flesh blanks. I wanted to emphasize the heavy-duty feel I get from the figure, so I painted it closer to a war-machine than a living mutant, with camouflage and weathering. This also gave me a light-weight opportunity to try free-handing camo on a figure before crossing that over to tank painting, and I’m pretty pleased with how it came out.
My latest package from Japan showed up, filling in some big holes in my collection, including a MIB Metalhawk, Dezaras, and Micromaster Rabbicrater, the figure that was exclusively packed in with the original Zone OVA VHS!
My first Real X Head custom! RxH is one of the premier Japanese designer vinyl companies, made from the ground up by Mori, the owner and creative genius behind the designs. I like the sculpts of the RxH figures alot, but there are so many colorways to chose from at this point that I’ve only picked up a few production pieces. To get most of the sculpts, I instead opted to snag an entire peach flesh set to do with as I pleased, including a couple extra of the Bigaro sculpt, seen here, to practice on.
This figure is designed as a tribute to Tetsujin-28, known in the US as Gigantor, one of the original animated giant robots from way back in the late 1960’s. I love the classic muted blue of Gigantor, with its small splashes of color for trim. The yellow 28s on the arms are a nod to the later redesigned T-28, which had big yellow stenciled 28s on its forearms. I had originally airbrushed the eye, but my aim is not true enough yet, and my yellow paint was not the best mix, so I colored back over all of that and hand painted the eye area. Big thanks to my friend Sanjeev for his tip on how to ‘fake’ metallic colors with a thin silver coat over all the non-metallic colors! I had drawn up the ideas for this guy, and managed to paint the entire figure from start to finish in an evening. It still amazes me how much I can get done now with the airbrush! The ‘cape’ is painted to look like T-28’s distinctive jet-pack flame. When I was taking the photos, something dawned on me as well: the gold-mist Bigaro makes a perfect Black Ox stand-in! Watch as Bigantor copies some moves he saw in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen!
Pics of my shelves seem to have become pretty popular, so here’s an update including much better pics of my vinyl shelves, and the bottom shelf totally redone with my TF big-guns in anticipation of some new stuff coming! Right now I’m loving the Max Toy Co and glow display on my nightstand.
This big guy is a recast of an older WonderFest kit (I think!) of the Zentraedi Glaug officer’s battlepod from Super Dimensional Fortress: Macross. The Glaug is a tough design to render due to the spindly arms, and I had to use alot of pins on the parts to keep it stable. I actually finished this kit a year ago, but only finally took it back off the shelf to re-fix the arms the other day, and figured it was time to finally photograph it all finished. The decals were made by me in Photoshop, using a scan of the decal sheet from a 1/72 Glaug plastic kit (either an Arii kit or Imai I assume), printed on clear decal stock. This was the first time I made my own decals, and I’m pretty happy with how they came out… I think the clear backing worked really well with the gunship greys of the machine, and gave it a bit more subdued look, instead of totally bright stand out colors all over the mech. I replaced the antenna on the side of the cockpit with a piece cut from thin Plasticard. Painted with a couple of random Tamiya and Testor’s rattle cans I had on hand, and then detailed with acrylics and a brush. I did all those yellow stencils on the legs by hand, and it took a long time to get them to where I was happy with them. An oil wash and weathering pigments rounded out the package, along with clear red on silver for all the sensor lights.
My current shelf setup… a combination of real robots in scale and the vintage super robots I’ve been accumulating lately, along with some vinyls and vintage Transformers.
Prometheus Rising Studios 