Sgt Verde Buster Gundam has a pretty standard amount of parts for an SD kit:
However, when you realize just how much each of these parts need to be painted up, the build actually starts to feel a bit daunting!
A quick note on the decals - as you can see, it does have a bunch of them, and from what I can tell, they’re mainly concentrated to a few specific parts of the body, namely the chest and front skirt armor. That means that the legs, arms, and its entire backside use little to no decals.
On Clear Coating
This is the first time I’ll be attempting to use gloss clear coat on a model since I built the Kampfer way back in the day. That was a near disaster, as the paint dried to a very sticky, goopy finish. However, this time I’m using a different brand of paint, and I’m much more mindful now of the effects of humidity, so I think I’ll be alright.
On (Re)Painting
The model has two main colors - black and blue. As far as I can tell, most of the pieces are in their proper color straight out of the box. However, the blue pieces look a little too dark to my eye, so I decided to try and paint them in a slightly lighter hue.
I don’t know if I actually managed to pull it off. If it is lighter, then it’s only by a hair. At least I didn’t make it worse.
Feet
The feet are made out of black plastic, just to give you an idea of just how much painting I had to do:
Ankle Armor
The ankle armor uses four different colors, and was arguably the most difficult thing to paint on the entire kit:
All I can say is that I swear it looks better in person.
Shin Armor
The model has a pair of blue and red lights strapped to its shins. Rather than give you one red piece and one blue piece, Bandai chose to keep costs down by giving you two red pieces, and one blue decal to wrap around one of them.
That’s certainly a solution, but it would mean that one light looks translucent, and the other opaque. I decided instead to just paint them both:
These two pieces eventually plug in to this:
Which gives us this:
This is some nice use of parts layering, and it won’t be the last time we see it.
Legs
The legs themselves are pretty boring, which is fine, since the ankle and shin armors more than make up for it:
We get a bit of color in the back, and that’s about it.
This is actually the perfect segue into talking about my biggest gripe with this kit. Despite the fact that you have to do so much painting, the instruction booklet comes with no color guide, and no close up reference photos. If you’re the kind of person who wants/needs to mix up paint (either for hand brushing, or airbrushing), you’ll have to guess at what colors and the proportions to use. It also means you’ll have to guess as to what, exactly, needs to be painted. For example, looking at this photo here, it isn’t 100% obvious to me what sections are meant to be black, and which are supposed to be blue:
Adding in insult to injury is the fact that several pages of the foldout manual are devoted to a mini-manga:
All they needed to do was devote one page to a color guide. Just one. They’d still have one extra page to slap in a 4-koma and an advertisement! I guess they assume that anyone dedicated enough to paint these SD Gundams won’t need the help, but I definitely would have liked it.
Skirt Armor
The Skirt Armor has a lot going on:
It has a lot of colors, a lot of parts, and a lot of layers. At first glance It looks like an absolute nightmare to try and paint.
But what if I told you that isn’t? This is the one part of the model that is nearly perfectly color accurate out of the box. It uses a lot of the included decals, and the parts are engineered in very intricate ways, as if the designers were going out of their way to prevent you from having to paint (and what is left to paint is all very small and simple).
This part of the kit is indeed impressive, but it also frustrates me. It proves that my original assumptions about these SD World Heroes kits were not entirely crazy. It turns out Bandai can make these models, with all their glorious detail, with a bare minimum amount of extra painting. They just choose not to, presumably to keep the price low. Normally I’m okay with that, but this is one instance in which I think we’d be better off with a more expensive, but better engineered design.
Side/Rear Skirt Armor
The rear skirt armor has an impressive amount of detail in its own right - and it was way easier to paint than you might think:
The side skirts are just rectangles:
One of them has a slot for holding Sarge’s gun.
Speaking of which, let’s wrap this post up with a look at the accessories.
Handcuffs
You’ve already seen these in all the photos of the finished model, as they attach to the front skirt armor:
I suppose a set of handcuffs is an appropriate accessory, but they’re not very interesting. They’re too simple in shape, too large, and they don’t lend themselves all that well to action poses.
Oh, and they do open up:
Gun
The gun is made of two pieces, one of which has a large, thin tab poking out from the top. You’re supposed to wrap this up in a gold decal, so that once assembled it will look like there are gold lines running along the inside:
In fact, there are supposed to be lots of gold lines running along the gun, though unless you assemle it first, it’s a bit hard to figure out which ones you need to paint, and which ones come from the decal.
In any case, I think I did well enough adding in all the details:
That’s quite the handcannon, and is a bit reminiscent of a certain other robotic cop’s sidearm:
Assembling the Lower Half
We have enough parts now to put the lower half together:
I’m already impressed with the level of depth and detail. It’s like they fused a cop, a mobile suit, and a police motorcycle together. There’s so much going on, yet it doesn’t feel too busy.
Upon assembly, I quickly learned that the handcuffs had to go. They just barely fit within the space between the skirt armor and the legs, and as far as I can tell they make it extremely difficult to pose or adjust the model. I’m just going to take - and keep - them off. It’s not like the model looks bare without them.
Here’s an interesting fact - the front skirt armor is attached on a ball joint:
I have no clue as to why. All I know is that it is very easy to accidentally make it go crooked, which sucks when you only realize you did so after taking photos. Front skirts don’t tend to be placed on ball joints like this, and I wonder what, if any reason there was for doing so in this case. Maybe it’s to create enough space/clearance for him to fit into one of his many accessories (sold separately, of course).
Conclusion
So far so good I suppose. None of this painting was easy, but aside from the ankle armor, it all came out better than I expected.
However, I have a feeling that the upper body may prove even more challenging. We’ll find out in Part 3.
In our last episode, we saw how much work is needed to bring the lower half of Sgt. Verde Buster Gundam to life. Today we’ll see if the top half is any easier.