I oversprayed the decals with white paint to cut the contrast a bit.
I printed my own decals on a laser printer: unfortunately this means the markings are all black, instead of red or gray. The paint job was meant to give the thing a bit of a worn look. I did replace the elbow joints with Wave T-Shaft parts – that gives the elbows more mobility but I mostly did it for looks. For instance, the pointed toes, the folded-up part of the separated buster rifles, or the rotated upper arms. I wasn’t interested in turning this thing into a better action figure so I focused on setting it into a good pose mostly by cutting and re-joining parts. The original kit was reasonably poseably but it had exposed polycap elbow joints and was missing a few bits of articulation that should be present on a Wing Zero Custom kit. The resulting V-fin has a very refined look, but it’s strong enough that I could probably drop the thing on its head and it’d be OK. The original scratch-built part was very fragile, so I made a mold and recast the part in resin over a core of piano wire. I scratch-built a replacement from sheet styrene, a Kotobukiya rectangular vernier part, and polyester putty. The kit-supplied forehead antenna was pretty hopeless: way too thick with soft detail all over. I recast the wings in resin, then made new feathers from styrene and polyester putty, recast them to create the duplicates. The wings themselves were pretty nicely shaped, but the feathers were thick and slab-like. Probably the most significant modification was the wings: the original, kit-supplied wings were made of a rubbery soft plastic. Back then I actually kept logs of the time I spent on different projects – I spent around a hundred hours on this thing over a period of three months. (It’s kind of hard to believe now, that there was a time when they sold Gundam kits and action figures in retail stores in the US!) It turned into a fairly massive project. Originally I bought the kit as an impulse buy at the local Target. This is a project I did several years ago: the 1:144 High Grade Wing Zero from Endless Waltz. Subject: Wing Gundam Zero (Endless Waltz version)
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