Gundam model kit - Panel lining with acrylic paint

There are so many people love gunpla and buy a few for collection. Just feeling weird when found that what assembled is different from what the box display looks like. One of the easiest way to make your kit looks what it is "supposed" to be, just do panel lining.

There are different ways to do panel lining, we can use gundam marker, acrylic and I only know these 2 methods actually.

I started with gundam marker, at the beginning the result is so stunning to me (the first couple of times) but slowly I think it is worse, the line is too thick and it is not easy to erase extra paint, and so I decided to move on to Acrylic paint.

I know now for beginners, the idea of mixing up thinner and acrylic paint is only for the pro. But after taking initiative to try, I was so amazed that it is actually very very simple and even simpler than gundam marker.

How to do it:

Just prepare acrylic paint black or grey ( grey for white kits), a bottle of thinner, a fine head brush and cotton bud. If you can't find thinner for acrylic paint you can always replace with Zippo the lighter refill liquid, Zippo dries fater.

Mix the acrylic paint and thinner on a plate, the ratio can be 1 paint: 5 thinner and you will know when you do it.

dip you brush in the paint and just lightly touch the line on the kits with the brush and you will see some panel it will automatically filled up.

And then very important, wait for the paint to be totally dry first. you can even leave it overnight. Then soak the cotton bud with thinner or Zippo and clean out the extra paint that you don't want.

And that's all.

Put on paint on all the line that you wanna "draw" and let it dry

Soak a cotton bud with thinner or Zippo and wipe off the excessive paint

Repeat to clean with wet cotton bud until it becomes like this

The picture is a RG GP01. Acrylic paint panel lining is the only way to do panel lining for RG kits I think because the parts is too tiny to use marker. Believe me I try maker on my RG RX-78-2, the result is horrible and I stop immeadiately. (That was my first RG, and was that incident that drove me to try acrylic paint.)

I believe so many of us have seen or amazed by the techniques to make Gundam kit look really cool like panel lining, weathering, painting. And think that was only for pros. But I think if we take initiative to try to try it is never hard. wink.