It’s been a few months since I last built gunpla, let alone made a video on it, so here’s a blog instead. I referenced in a video before that I was considering taking the whole “Build & Chill” series off of YouTube and just move it here but people really pushed back on that. Even then, there’s still ~some~ stuff I’d like to do on here rather than in video form. Also, I just like having an excuse to write more outside of work. 

I love the 00 Gundam’s design so damn much. Something about the traditional Gundam design with the big dumb backpack coming out behind the shoulders and the highlights of green and black does it for me. I have RG and MG 00 Raiser kits (well, variants, but whatever) in the backlog I’ll probably make videos on. 

Going to be honest – I’ve been halfway to completing my 1/144 HGUC Zeta Gundam build since January and it has just been sitting at my desk forever now. I find that SD kits are a quick and easy way to just hop in and feel a fast sense of progress and accomplishment that gets me back into the building mood, so I shelved the Zeta for now. That’ll be my next build. 

Let’s crack the box open and see what’s inside. I’ll take you through my simple “panel line-only” build process. 

Here’s all the runners, stickers, and manual for the kit. For any kit, it always amazes me how all these different sheets of plastic come together to make something so well-engineered and sturdy. Even with 15+ kits built, I still have those “eureka” moments in the process of building, when you see how things are designed to operate, that keep it fun. For smaller SD kits like this, it blows my mind how minimal the actual material is that goes into making them. There’s a reason these are usually less than $10. Though, to be fair, you pay a heavy sticker-tax because of it, especially on the SD-EX Standard line.

We’ll touch on differences in SD lines a bit later. I have another SD 00 Gundam kit from the much more highly-regarded BB Senshi line too, so we can do a direct enough comparison. In addition, there’s a new SD line coming out next month that looks like it might be the best of both worlds.

I know a lot of people unfamiliar with model kits don’t really get how they’re put together, and even in the videos I make the kinda crappy layout I’m stuck with doesn’t do the best job of letting you see, so let me explain. You use a pair of cutters to cut the pieces of plastic that connect to the part you need (listed in the instruction manual, step-by-step, kinda like a lego guide) and then use a knife to cut off any excess “nubs.” Nub removal is a bit of a pain but they look rather unsightly if left unchecked.

Unfortunately, because I don’t paint or topcoat or anything like that, I can’t use sanding sticks or sandpaper to help remove nubs. Many people use those and then cover up the leftover scratches with paint. Since I’m keeping to the straight-up plastic I have to just do the best I can with my knife, but there will always be stress marks (white marks left by warped plastic) and nub residue leftover. From personal experience, as long as you do something to clean them up even a little bit, it goes a long way. A lot better than just ignoring them. 

The only “painting” I do is panel lining, which is so simple I recommend it even for beginners. Using Gundam markers (there are more advanced ways of going about this, this is just the cheapest and easiest) you fill in any details or panels you’d like to pop out more. Then, you run a q-tip or hi-polymer eraser over the painted panel and clean up any excess as best as you can. Something like this face plate is really easy to get nice, strong, clean panel lines out of. That being said, weirdly-shaped pieces with more intricate curves and hard-to-reach crannies can be a pain to clean. Once again, just do what you can. 

These head peaces aren’t too terribly hard to panel line. You can see some extra paint residue in some awkward spots that I couldn’t clean with my eraser, but I did my best to rub them down with a q-tip. It’s good enough for me, frankly. It might be hard to tell in the photo, but the vents on the side were filled in with marker and then dirtied up by rubbing it gently with a q-tip. It’s an easy way to make any sort of exhaust port-type details pop out and look like they’ve actually been used. Normally these vents would have dark gray stickers covering them, but I decided to do it my way instead.

I’ve mentioned it a bit already but it’s worth bringing up formally now: SD-EX Standard kits come with an awful lot of stickers to help fill in for colors due to the minimal amount of plastic in the package. A lot of people hate them. For one thing, the shiny foil sticks out compared to the rest of the kit. To make matters worse the adhesive on them isn’t the greatest (it can take a few tries to force them to rest right in my experience) and they crinkle easily when applied. Most people who paint their kits try to apply as few of them as necessary and just paint what they want to instead. Even then, a lot of people will still use stickers for things such as the eyes, because painting that small and detailed of an element is a pain and smaller stickers like that generally look pretty good. 

After putting some stickers on the face plate and finishing up our stickers and panel-lining on the two head pieces, we cut out a red face piece that contains the little chin protrusion you see here and a spot to put the eye sticker/paint in eyes. With all that said and done, we now have a SD 00 Gundam head. Yay! 

Speaking of red, this is a good spot for me to shoehorn in some color selection discussion. Panel lining markers come in brown, gray, and black variants. I’m using black for the entirety of this kit because it gives off a more cartoon-y contrast for the panels and details. I usually do that for all my SD kits. But for the “more serious” gunpla kits, the general rule of thumb is to use gray panel markers on white plastic, brown panel markers on lighter colors, and black panel markers on darker colors. You still bring out the details, but in a more subtle and realistic-looking way. 

Here’s the V-fin that’ll go on the head. It’s all one white piece with colored stickers on top, which is fairly standard for SD-EX kits. I get why they had yellow stickers for the top two fins because there’s no yellow runner in the first place, but I think it’s a little ridiculous they couldn’t make the red jewel an actual plastic part on the red runner. That being said, I’m not going to complain because I can’t even begin to hypothesize how the economics of plastic model kit production and distribution work. 

This thing’s chest is sticker city, which again, is to be expected from this line. This isn’t even all of them, there’s about 5 or 6 more stickers. The other photos I took building this part all glitched out on me, but even from this one alone I think you get the idea. 

And here are the arms. Stickers on this piece are much better and easier to place than the head and chest. You can see the gray, soft-and-flexible polycap piece at the elbows. These pieces are used for simulating joints and normally aren’t visible, but with so few pieces to work with a lot of SD kits leave them exposed in places. 

Unfortunately, I need to hit the hay before I can finish this kit build and blog, but I’ll be back tomorrow. We’re over halfway done. We just need the legs, the waist, and the weapons and we’re good to go. Let me know if you enjoyed this!