PLAMO DIARIES

After around two months of work, here finally is my completed Bandai 1/144 scale Millennium Falcon. This build involved a lot of firsts for me: airbrushing , applying decals on bumpy surfaces , gunk-washing a kit , hand-painting pilot figures , installing custom LEDs , scratch-building a base , and even making my own light box for the purpose of this shoot. So without further ado, here are some photos of my completed model.

In the continuing tradition of giving myself more work than what I planned for , I had the urge to build a base that would conceal a power bank and a USB toggle switch for the lighting setup of my Millennium Falcon. I had never scratch-built anything with plastic before, but I thought a box would be an easy start. My idea was to make a base that the included sand-dune base could just sit on top of. A base for the base, if you will.

Before I started with this kit, I didn't really care for lighting it up. And I especially didn't care for the official Bandai lighting unit that sells for half the price of the model kit itself ($20?!). But when I saw how much space there was inside the hull, I couldn't help but take a stab at it.

Way back when I had just started with the kit , one of the first things I did was to attempt to hand-paint the details inside the turret gun wells using Gundam markers, which were the only paints I had at the time. I didn't care too much about screen accuracy at the start, but I came to regret my color choices as the build went on. Still, I couldn't be bothered to redo it for something that I knew would hardly be seen.

With the decals and gloss topcoat in place, it was time to move on to weathering the kit. My challenge was that, aside from panel-lining and light usage of Tamiya Weathering Master, I had never seriously weathered a model before. For this kit, I researched a bit and saw lots of recommendations to start weathering with an enamel or oil wash. I was hesitant about using an enamel wash because I was still worried about aggravating  some of the cracks from before  even though the model was already protected by layers of lacquer topcoat. And I didn't want to deal with the smell of that much thinner. Oil paint wasn't really in consideration either as I didn't want to buy some new oil paint tubes and turpentine. Instead, I had an idea to make my own wash using my really old (nearly 20 years I think) Prang semi-moist watercolor set. If it turned out bad, I could just wash it off under the tap, I thought. To be on the safe side, I searched around for tutorials or discussions on the u...

The Millennium Falcon comes with an assortment of colored panels and markings. And to reflect them on this kit, you can choose between decals and good old-fashioned masking. I definitely wanted to avoid the masking route because of a bad experience in a previous build and because I thought it would be easier to just use the decals. Bandai was generous enough to include both sticker and water slide decals in most of their Star Wars kits. The stickers are actually really good, but I decided to go with the water slides because I think the colors are slightly better. And I actually enjoy the process of applying them.

A bit more than a month after my hiatus from this kit , my paints and airbrush kit finally arrived. For paints, I bought a couple of lacquer-based primers and top coats and water-based acrylics from Armored Komodo since they were well-priced and highly recommended by a friend. Spoiler alert: I don't have a lot of experience with other paint brands, but I like these so far.

For my first few posts, I'll be backtracking on some builds that I had already completed , most recent of which is the Bandai Millennium Falcon 1/144 The Force Awakens version. My dad insisted that I pick up this kit when we were in Japan in 2016. I had built the 1/72 Resistance X-Wing  the previous year, so I knew the quality to expect. And for 4000 yen, it wasn't a hard choice. And this was before I knew I hated Disney Star Wars. But that's another story altogether.

Where to begin? It's been a few years since I'd last blogged, let alone written anything in paragraphs. I'm honestly having trouble stringing words together for this first post. But I guess the writing process itself will be one of my objectives here, which reminds me that some context and my objectives for this blog are probably what I should've written about in the first place. So onto some background: I'm Nix. I like giant robots. And I also like scale models of giant robots. And with the territory comes liking other plastic models (plamo). Hence the name of the blog. I've been straight-building kits for a few years now, only adding a few enhancements like panel lining and decals. But the recent quarantine has given me time and motivation to learn painting, modding, and scratch-building, the progress of which I've been sharing to my friends on our group chat. Constantly. So yes, I also started this blog so that I can spam them less often. Hopefully. Lastl...