[2015 Refurb] AMX-101GM Scarab Gallus

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If you have not seen it before, I had butchered up some spare kits while I was out at sea last year for a group build space pirate project and dubbed it the Gallus GM [Ren Custom]. I had the full intention of painting this kit, but after almost a half year at sea, I stopped all things Gunpla for almost the entirety of my vacation. Most of it was filled with Monster Hunter, while the other part of it was filled with weddings. When the Refurb Contest of 2015 was announced, I was wondering what I should do for this contest.

As it were, I was required to submit something that had been placed on Reddit in the past. In this case, most of my kits were posted by my brother while I was away at sea; one of which was the Schuzrum Gallus. So I figured I should finish off this build and finally put it to rest.

Between the original post, and now, a couple changes were made: the upper arms of the pirate weapon set arms were replaced by the shield arms of the Powered GM Cardigan and at the end of those arms, the shields from the Thunderbolt Full Armor Gundam were placed.

Although I had primed the kit before, I decided to prime the entire kit again. A combination of Tamiya XF-54 Dark Sea Grey, XF-3 Flay Yellow, XF-7 Flat Red, Krylon's Sprayon Stencil Ink Flat Black and Mr Color H50 Gloss Lime Green was used. Most of the kit was painted flat grey and yellow, while few details were painted flat red. The panels that were Lime green were to give that used car look where some panels came from another suit.

 

After painting some of the panels flat grey, I found that the inner machinery was a very similar grey. To set a slight color difference, I decided to make the innards look more used than the outside armor. For the panel washing I used a watered down X-50 NATO Brown. For the dry brushed scratches, I used X-32 Titanium Silver. I first applied the dry brushing, and then I panel washed afterwards to give a rusty hue. However, this did not pop out as much as I wanted.

Because I was working with a High Grade kit, much of the color separation was done through painting alone; many mistakes were made. When I finally got to the shield, my good friend had just bought an air brush and he was good enough to rub it in my face. In doing so, I was able to get some nice clean coats of yellow on the shields. After that was done drying off, I masked the front and painted the black warning stripes. Although the low quality of the tape caused the lines to not be very straight, the weathering afterwards masked it enough.

 

As I started taking pictures for the contest and found that the backpack was shaped like a beetle. Now, the story states that this is a scavenging suit for the space pirates. That being said, I decided to look up some stuff on dung beetles. Apparently they are part of the Scarabaeinae beetle subfamily. Thus I decided to change the name to the Scarab Gallus.

As with the contest from last year, all I wanted was an excuse to work on an old kit of mine. Not only did I learn quite a bit about painting, but I also had a metric ton of fun working on this kit again, and I hope that everyone working on the Refurb Contest had as much fun as I did; May the best kit win!