1/100 Gundam Virtue Part 7

Pink or blue, pink or blue, pink or blue ...
Focusing on the head of 1/100 Gundam Virtue in this posting. ^^



The vents on both sides of the head are painted gray using Gundam Marker.


Panel lining for the parts' rear side. The gray "dot" was painted back in Part 2.



Instead of using the foil sticker piece included, I painted the chin on Gundam Virtue's mask red using Gundam Marker.


Simple panel lining work for Gundam Nadleeh's head parts.


While the overall helmet is pretty standard for its design and details, the GN Stripe portion on top of the head presents a very unique issue. ^^;


The stripes are light blue for Gundam Virtue, ...


... but pink for the Gundam Nadleeh, to compliment its "hair" and "mustache" obviously. XD
However, on this kit itself, you can only choose either light blue or pink since the area with the color dispute is technically the same. ^^;


After pondering about the two colors for a while, I chose pink as the color for the GN Stripes, since it'll be mighty obvious when some of the helmet parts are discarded in Gundam Nadleeh form. Also, pink can be a special standalone color on Gundam Virtue's head, while light blue is a lot less associative with the pink cable parts.


The color is from Gundam Marker GM14 Fluorescent Pink by the way.
Panel lines are added after excessive paint is scratched away using a knife.


The middle portion is painted gray using Gundam Marker.
Special care is important so that no spillover paint might ruin the pink GN Stripes. ^^;


Panel lines added for the entire helmet.


Painted the tiny area beneath the forehead black using normal marker to give it a little more depth.
Painted in bright pink they are, but I suspect I might have to do a repaint on the GN Stripes, maybe adding a bit of red to it, since the cable parts that come with the kit are molded in red instead of pink. ^^; Pink is the color shown in the manual, but the cable parts shown in there were already painted in pink. That's something I didn't really realize until the end of the work. ^^;

Another color that might be chosen is null - no paint for the parts at all. ^^ That would render the need to make a selection between the two colors totally unnecessary no doubt, and I did thought of this too. "Too hard to decided? Then don't decide at all. Just leave the area white as it is." Then again, all the other three 1/100 scale "Gundam Double O" Season One Gundams have their GN Stripes painted, so I don't really want to break the "tradition" here. ^^; Leaving them blank might looks fine for Gundam Virtue, but when the cable parts are connected on Gundam Nadleeh's head, the blankness on top would be mighty obvious. ^^;

It would be great if there are option parts included for the GN Stripes when the kit was first released, but I suppose the designer didn't think that such details is important for this release. ^^; The HCM-Pro version comes with two types of head, so there's no need for it to choose between the colors. ^^;

Anyway, everything is done for Gundam Virtue now (save for the repaint work to be done on the GN Stripes). After much of the here-and-there paint work shown in Part 2 and 3, majority of the parts are really large in size, which are a great joy to work with. ^^ I love large Gunpla parts, particularly when they are large but with tons of details. You can see the details, and feel the size of the parts in your hands as well. Very cool. ^^

Will be keeping this kit in its box for a while before returning to it for the final assembly. ^^