Gundam Wing MURCURIUS 1/144

This model is quite easy to assemble. Quality wise it's a typical low end 1/144 Gundam model. It comes with a gun which has holes on one side. After spending time to patch the holes, I decided to dump it completely. It also comes with two branches of satellite discs, or whatever they are called. The discs are not a bad idea, they just don't translate very well into scale modelling. Then there are a shield and a lighting sword. The sword requires thorough painting and it probably looks like a tree afterward. In the end, I got rid of the sword, the gun, and the discs. My Mercuris probably will have a hard time in a battle... Let's not worry about it for now, let's go on with the color.

Initially I painted the Mercuris red, according to the book. Somehow in red it didn't look very well, at least for me. Color is a matter of personal preference anyway. I always wanted to try airbrushing chrome, and this seemed to be an ideal candidate. I decided to paint it with Testors' Aluminum. Through this project I realized airbrushing chrome is not easy. Basically the paint itself is more difficult to work with. I won't go into details here because I wasn't very successful with either the paint or the airbrushing part, but I can show you the mistakes I made: I guess the biggest drawback is that I have a layer of red paint initially. If I had primed it with grey or white instead, the result would probably be much better. At least 5 layers of aluminum have been applied and still I can see the redness underneath. Then There was this problem with the paint being either too thick or overflowing. The inconsistence may be due to my paint/thinner ratio, airbrushing skill, or the paint itself. Maybe I should use enamel instead of acrylic for chrome. I sill don't the answers yet. If you have any suggestion, please leave them in my guestbook.

The result is quite refreshing for a MS but could be better. I tried to salvage the overall look using decals and weathering. It looks a little rough, but certain is unique.