I’ve never been to Japan. I would like to but I suspect I may never be able to. Sigh.

This hasn’t prevented me from admiring the sense of aestethics in the Japanese culture. Or what I see of it through the narrow window of literature, comics and movies. This picture is probably more distorted than I realise but it is what I have.

The Japanese toy manufacturer Bandai offers incredible quality when it comes to plastic injection model kits. It is unlike anything else out there. I’ve built some Bandai Star Wars models but I wanted to try something different. The Japanese Gundam thing looks great, mecha suits, not robots, as I found out. I wanted one.

I knew nothing about the various versions within the Gundam lore, never watched any of the tv-shows, also blissfully uninformed of the variations in the Bandai product line. There were many different scales and difficulty levels available. After some serious googling I ended up buying the Bandai Perfect Grade Gundam RX-78-2 mecha suit in 1:60 scale.

I’ve not built anything of this sort before and for a newbie the kit offered some surprises. Biggest surprise I guess were the sprues with parts that had molded in ball joints. I hadn’t seen anything like that before. It was rather exotic for such an old kit, or any kit for that matter, this model was originally released in 1998. How much more complex the latest version that goes by the “Unleashed” brand can even be? It looks insanely more detailed in photographs. I’m glad I didn’t buy that one. It would have been too overwhelming.

Painting this was very different to what I am used to, all the exterior parts had to be painted before assembly. Due to the precision of the parts, no paint must go on the internal structures, connecting pins and such. If you paint them the parts don’t fit anymore, the layer of paint ruins it. It’s THAT precise! This meant lots of tape masks. Organising all this part by part was not the most pleasant thing about this build.

I wanted this to look different than the stock red/yellow/white so I painted it in white with two shades of blue. Cold, wintery colours, I suppose. The decals that came with the kit were stickers. I didn’t like them very much. So, I bought some waterslide decals online only to realise afterwards that they were for the Unleashed version, not this. I used them regardless and they are all over the place. The colours were wrong anyway so whatever. Wrong colours and details must be somewhat irritating thing to look at for those who actually know this stuff. Ignorance is bliss in my case.

First tabletop photographs of the just painted Gundam RX-78-2. This thing has an astonishing range of movement, fingers and all. And check out the lights in the eyes! I was prepared to hack this for lighting it but due to the complex structure it looked like a very difficult thing to pull off. But in the end I didn’t have to do it, this thing sported lights already, straight from the box!

I have made a few photocomposites with the Gundam model to see how it is to work with. The following two were made with photographs I took on one beautiful foggy day in 2023.

The Guardian, 2023. The fog, which is probably my favourite natural phenomena to photograph in, was amazing the day I took this. Everywhere I looked, just beautiful.
The Sunspotter
The Sunspotter, 2023. The catch in this one are the spots on the sun. They are genuine sunspots. I figured they’d go well with the Gundam model.

Like with most of the models I’ve built there is an idea or two for a photograph when building them. Sometimes even before building. This one was no exception. But the photograph I had in mind with this one hasn’t really emerged yet. I’ve tried it but it has proven to be a bit of a challenge for me. Meanwhile I have continued experimenting with it, like the one with the church below.

The Helsinki Cathedral and the RX-78-2 Gundam, in a beautiful blizzard, April 2024. I went there three times to try this. One time I locked myself out of my car while it was running with keys in the ignition and camera in the front seat. It took 45 minutes in the freezing blizzard for the locksmith to come and open the doors. It cost me 150€. What we do for art.

The white Helsinki Cathedral is a popular subject of photography, a tourist attraction. I didn’t quite get what I had in mind with the blizzard and light but it’s close. I’ll probably try again next winter.

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Tags: gundam, inspirations, scale models