I'm pretty pleased with this one: HG Aerial Rebuild
I got this for my birthday; I haven't built one in several months and was honestly kinda done for the time being... But I'll absolutely do another when it's given to me[1]! Since I loved the waterslides on the tiny one I previously did, I ordered a set made for this kit. I'm glad I did too--they provide a lot of red that's just not present otherwise.
For contrast, here's two photos from schizophonic9--this site typically reviews gunpla with as few stickers placed as possible (usually just eye ones) to make it really clear what you're getting out of the box (Gunpla product photos are all professionally painted). So for anyone reading going, "neat robot" and knowing little about these models, I hope this helps show how much fun I had with this: I went from this to the guy in all my photos 😌
I'm quite pleased with how the contrast shoulder went; I wanted to try painting a larger section and wanted to try and offset how heavily blue this is on the top half. I thought about doing an entire arm in yellow or possibly caution stripes, but the silhouette didn't feel conducive to that. In the end this stretched my skills in paint consistency, brush shape choice, and application technique. I partially did the shoulder with a sponge to help even the strokes out; the yellow needed so many coats even after priming over the blue with multiple coats of white.
I uh, also turned around and used birthday money on another, too, so. ↩︎