I’ve alluded several times previously that I’ll dedicate January to building kits from the Gundam SEED series. Following my completion of the HG Destiny Gundam at the literal tail-end of 2023, I immediately targeted the HG Aile Strike Gundam as the next kit. To clarify, this is NOT the HGCE Aile Strike Gundam, just the vanilla 2002 High Grade kit. Yes, this thing is two decades old, and it really shows.
Taking a little tangent for a bit, opening the box really reminded me of the first time I bought this kit, probably around 2003 during my freshman year in university. Back then, I only built kits straight out of the box and was quite frustrated with its complete color inaccuracy. So much so that when I started painting kits to be color accurate, I ultimately decided to just skip this guy as I thought painting would be too much of a hassle.
And it was indeed since outside of those in the legs, every other exposed internal frame section needs to be painted. This includes both the torso and the shoulders, especially the shoulders. I usually build in sub-assemblies so I would want these to be in the correct colors before sealing everything with a flat topcoat. Ultimately, this meant spending around three days just masking and painting these parts.
The same goes for the Aile Striker as the thruster parts are completely molded in red, meaning the actual areas where the thrusts come out need to be painted in black. Given that these are behind grills that meant to stay red, I had to do some creative toothpick painting to get the paint in these tight areas.
Overall, I consider completing this kit as an achievement as I was set on skipping this altogether. Not to mention this is technically the progenitor of the modern non-HGUC 1/144 scale High Grade lines so all imperfections found on this kit paved the way to the innovations Bandai Spirits has been doing recently.
The next on my January SEED builds would, of course, be the HG Freedom Gundam. I believe this should be a little easier in terms of the pre-requisite paint work, but we’ll see once I actually start building.
