Tomopop promoted story of the week: Journey's end: my Knight of Gold is completed!

3:00 PM on 07.30.2009   |   Brian Szabelski

This week's promoted story comes to us from GundamJehutyKai. He's been working on a kit of Knight of Gold from the manga The Five Star Stories for quite some time, and now, it's finally done. To celebrate that, GundamJehutyKai's created a C-Blog with pictures of how the kit turned out once it was all assembled and painted, and it looks great! Plus, the stories he tells about the pitfalls he ran into while putting it together are very enlightening on the whole kit building process.

Want one of your stories on the Tomopop homepage? Head on over to the C-blogs and tell us your favorite toy story, review a piece from your own collection or snap some gorgeous photos. We keep an eye out for the best of the best, and some of you guys are amazing. Hit the jump and check out GundamJehutyKai's awesome finished Knight of Gold!

Journeys end. My Knight of Gold is COMPLETED!!!
by GundamJehutyKai on 07/29/2009

I was asked to write up a little something by Colette after I mentioned that this kit was nearly complete.
Well, here she is!!! (is it just me, or do other people tend to automatically denote objects as female when it has no definite gender? like cars and stuff...) The Knight of Gold from the manga The Five Star Stories.

I'll do a quick abrigded version of my main blog post as I don't want this cblog to run too long afterall.
If you're interested, you can go here for the full thing.

This kit was a gift from a friend (though I'm user his reasons were not quite as pure as thinking that it would make a nice present) and is a G-systems recast of the 1/100 scale Knight of Gold kit from a company called Work Shops cast.

It has taken me over a year to complete as, to be frank, I feared it!! There are many many parts to it and the instructions were useless so I had several bags of parts of various sizes with no idea how they fit together.



Eventually, I was able to get enough info through analysis and trial and error to make the 2 legs and the project took off. I tried to mix my own shade of gold as I was unhappy with the colour most gold paints dried to, but I ran out of the mix around the time I completed the upper body. This caused the project to pretty much stall. I then picked up the project again several weeks ago as I felt a strong urge to paint again, as my last kit was near the beginning of the year. Unable to muster a desire to start a new kit from scratch, I continued with my KoG.



This time, however, I tried a different approach to the gold colour scheme. Using 2 shades of gold I picked up from a model shop, I sprayed the entire part with a colour called "old gold" which dried to a near silver like finish and then lightly sprayed over a darker shade of "bright gold" to darken the look to end up with what you see in the pics above.



Old gold is on the right. Bright gold on the left. Unfortunately, that also meant that I had to repaint all the other parts I had done until then ... but it wasn't as hard as I thought it would be. Details such as those on the shoulders were done by hand.

The kit game me numerous headaches. Being a recast, many parts didn't quite fit well together and when the time came to put the buster cannon on the back into place, I found that the model was too back heavy to stand up correctly. So I had to break the feet off and glue them on again with the kit leaning a bit forward to compensate for the weight on the back.

Then, there was the time where I had to sculpt a new finger for the left hand after one broke off and went walkies and also the time when I was gluing the part which connects the body to the cannon and the entire waist section decided to fall apart, leaving me with the job to glue them all back together!!!



If it all sounds like a bit of a nightmare, it was!! To be fair, this kit has been the most difficult one I have done so far and none of the others come close to the number of headaches I had with the KoG so consider it the exception rather than the norm. Besides, look at how it turned out!! Beautiful ...

There are a whole load of details which you can only see when it's nearly complete, like the second face on the back of its head!

And the genitalia on the head. No, I don't know why the manga author drew that on there, but it is part of the design. Figma Shana, Nanoha and Fate were there to help hold the KoG in place while the glue on it's feet dried.

It definitely was an adventure working on this number, but I'm pretty happy with how it turned out despite the problems I encountered. And now, I can say how I'm one of the relatively small number of modellers who have completed a FSS kit!!

I'd like to do some more but not for a long time (eventually, maybe I'll try for the $1000, 1.7 meter tall Jagd mirage (the green one). Pfft, yeah right!!). I think I'll go back and do something a little simpler for my next project. My Kotobukiya Yoko resin kit has been waiting quite some time...

If people are interested, I can write some posts about my progression with some of my other kits. I already have the techniques written on my blog and I tend to do something similar anyway, but I might be able to put in a little more detail into cblog posts for those who might want to try their hand at making a resin kit.

(Incidentally, if you're serious about starting a garage kit, I would recommend one of Volks Try-GK series of kits, saber if you can find her since I don't know if they did the exact same thing with Yoko. They really REALLY try their best to help you out with the process with several sheets of technique help and decals for eyes, so you don't have to paint them yourself!)

God, this post went on for a while, didn't it? Everyone still awake?