Starting with Strike!

Hello, everyone. Before I get into my first Gunpla blog, I wanted to mention that this is my first blog ever and that any constructive criticism / advice or hate comments will be greatly appreciated and duly noted, respectively. Also, I decided to start this blog in the middle of painting, so it's not really from start to finish. Lastly, as I figure out how html works, the blog should look better than it is now. Now then, on with Gunpla!

Even though I'm not new with Gunpla itself, I've never actually fully built a model. When I say fully, I mean using the correct tools, painting, and detailing. I used twist the parts or forcefully break off the nubs. However, after finding and looking at the works from the people over at /r/gunpla, I decided to try fully building kits from now on. So I built myself a DIY painting booth, bought the necessary tools and paints, and most importantly the models. Since I'm new to the painting world of Gunpla, I figured I would start out with the easiest to build SD series. Thus, I chose this as my test / pratice kit:

I thought it would be easy because... well... it's the SD series, but wow was I wrong! Having bigger parts meant more than one color on a single part and having several colors on a single part meant lots and lots of masking, such as this:

You can also see how I messed up on that corner.

This is actually a shoulder piece that I will paint soon (possibly after blogging). This piece only needs 2 colors, but the amount of masking required is a handful thanks to all its edges and curves. But, there were a couple pieces that came out looking pretty good, like the torso pieces:

Really proud of how this piece came out!

Used flash to try to show the colors better... maybe?

The kit is a work in progress, but it's getting there little by little. I still have several pieces to paint. The good thing is that they all need only white paint. After that, I just have to snap fit, topcoat, and then panel lines. Lots of work left, but it'll be fun!

More pictures:

Parts that need painting. The shield definitely needs work.

Used silver as a base coat for the camera. Next layer will be clear blue.

Same goes for the back camera.