Tutorial Custom SIC Hyper Zabee / Hornet Part 4

All right! Im back! This is the final instalment for this tutorial but the length was so long, I didnt wanted to put the photo gallery in this post but rather another post with more commentaries on doing proper customs. So lets get to it!

By now we have finished all the harder and more complicated workstreams leaving some minor touchups etc to finish the custom, which is great! Also, you should realise by now how much work needs to be put into a complicated custom to make it to a level where it is passable!

One important aspect of doing customs that most people don't realise (myself included when I first started this hobby) is that its not about skills or materials, the most important aspect in making customs is PATIENCE!  You must always be patient enough to go through each motion and workstreams in detail and never try to push a custom due to time etc. Always in between workstreams, sit back and reflect "are you doing the right thing adding this detail? Have you gone through all the necessary steps before reaching where you are now? Are you satisfied with the work done so far?". Questioning yourself is very important and you might just find better ways and techniques to make your custom work :D

All right enought with the rantings, time to walk the talk!

In this instalment, we will finalise all the small stuff for Hyper Zabee custom and move on to the painting process.

The small stuff are:

1) That small snail thingie on his belt ;p
2) The Hyper wings on his lower arms
3) His feet mod
4) Knife mod

Small snail thingie mod (would be great if somebody tells me what this is suppose to be ;p)

All right, most likely most of you are wondering what I meant so I'll show you a photo of the original snail thingie on kabuto:

I didnt have an extra snail thingie and I didnt have my kabuto set around to replicate this snail thingie so I have to sculpt it out myself. I must admit I did a pissed-poor job out of it ;p

First thing i did was to get hold of a spare small belt zecter (is that whats its called?? ;p) from the kabuto set to use as a base. I chosed the one with the plug on its underside so that it can be connected to the side buckle of Hyper Zabee's belt. I then painstakingly sculpt each level of details of the snail thingie on the small zecter. For the protruding lever, I first drilled a tiny hole on the small zecter and glued a tiny metal wire on it as a base before covering it with putty. After a few days (there were many level of details on this small thing ;p), you will get the following results:

For the rod on the lever, I separately rolled up a tiny putty rod and let it dry first. Once its dried i glued the putty rod onto the end of the putty lever on the snail thingie like so:

I then colored the whole snail thingie in metallic silver and let it dry. Then I add the clear red and metallic yellow like so:

 Voila we're done. It looks crappy but I didnt really want to spend so much time on such a tiny detail ;p I did try my best to make it nice but I think I failed on this one meh ;p

Shoulder wing mod

Now those armor pads on punchhopper's lower arm are not removeable. Of course if i pull it hard enough Im sure I can remove them but thats not the point, those armor pads are necessary to arm his hive shield and giant perfect stinger. So they got to stay on. This means I need another mean to mount his Hyper Arm wings on his arms. I used a pair of Hyper Kabuto arm wings for this purpose. I cut off the armlet parts from the wings like so:

Then I drilled holes on the undersides of the wings (see action 1 below). I cut off some sprue from leftover gundam sprues to use as connectors. I glue these into the drilled hols (see actino 2 below).

I then drill holes onto punchhopper's lower arm about 45 degree below his arm pads and in between those yellow rings on his lower arms (since those parts are black in color so those holes will hardly be noticeable if at all which means no harm to overall esthetic of the figure, score!), see photo below. These holes act as connector for the sprues glued on the wings to connect on:

Feet mod

Next since I don't have any Hyper Kabuto feet to use, I have to custom them by adding putty details on them like so:

Afternote: I totally forgotten to add details on the front of the boots and only realised it when I was half painting the figure :( For complicated or lengthy customs I strongly suggest you keep a list of things to do and complete that you can tick off to so you won't miss the minor details which undermines the whole custom :(

Knife Mod

A very simple step of getting the kabuto knife to attach to Hyper Zabee's belt.

First drill a hole on the knife and glue a sprue on it to act as connector. Yea thats it ;p

The knife will be connected to that square side buckle on Hyper Zabee's belt like so:

And thats it for the sculptings and details! Here is a comparison of the finished mod Hyper Zabee (pre repaint) and Kickhopper:

Repaint:

Before I go into the repainting steps since a lot of people has asked if I used airbrush to do my paintings, I would like to say I don't use airbrush. I have a cheap mini airbrush from china but I still havent got around figuring out how to use it and clean it, so it has been gathering dust in a corner for the last half a year already ;p Also, airbrush are quite smelly and I have 2 small girls running amok at home. Can't have them breathe in those nasty paint fumes. So no, I don't use airbrush. Its still ok since most of the time when you are doing a S.I.C custom, there aren't really a lot of large smooth surface that require very smooth even paint layer anyway. The only time I see me using an airbrush would be when I custom SIC bikes which I have yet to complete one ;p

Repainting Hyper Zabee doesnt really involve a lot of repaints luckily. But there are a lot of parts that require linings and some depth of details.

First thing to do is to sand the areas that required painting later on especially those metal pieces on his legs.

Then repaint all those parts that require repaints with super metallic silver paint. In case I didnt mention it before, I use Mr Color paint for my customs. I use a primer layer only on the giant stinger and then a coat of super metallic silver over it. The proper thing to do is to prime all areas that require repaints but since all those areas I have already sanded them before plus they are not very smooth and large areas I figure it should be fine without a primer layer since I do do a layer of overcoat over the whole thing at the end. If anyone think this is incredibly wrong, please comment. I'll like to know myself ;p

I usually do 2 layers of super metallic silver to make sure the color sets in and the silver sheen shines through the next couple of paint layers.

Then I color the relevant parts with Super Metallic Yellow. I am still wondering if the previous metallic silver is necessary since this super metallic yellow also gives off an incredible amount of shine but I guess it should be all right as the silver wipes off all trace of the original colors.

And then a layer of clear yellow over the super metallic yellow giving it the gold color look I believe you can actually mix the super metallic yellow and the clear yellow together to skip 1 layer of paint, Ill try that next time:

Always remember to allow each layer of paint to be properly and fully dried before adding the next layer. Drying could take from 5 hours to the whole day depending on your place's humidity and sun light. If you can, try to do paintings on a bright sunny day and always try to avoid rainy days.

It looks real golden now ;p

Next, I was again at a loss as to what kind of color scheme he should have on top the gold. I tried a red edged scheme which seriously didnt work :( I was trying to match Kabuto's color scheme when he is in Hyper form until someone told me that color scheme is unique to Kabuto and not other riders ;p wasted 6 hours of waiting paint to dry pfft the perils of making customs of riders I hardly know and I didnt watch the series either ;p

I finally settled on a matt black edged scheme over the gold which works I guess :/ For the 3 red dots on his forehead, paint matt black on the background which will probably smudge over on the 3 dots. Repaint the red dots with super metallic silver followed by clear red.

For the underside of the giant shoulder pads, I used a darker grey color instead of silver.

Make sure to do touchups on overlapped paint etc.

After that its some serious lining works with a pen liner and a panel line accent color almost every lines on the figure. For certain areas such as his mouth grill, a thicker lining is necessary to accentuate the details. Certain areas where pen liners can't reach, use the panel liner.

After all the paint has dried, I sprayed a gloss top coat over it and thats it! Its finally finished, the next post will be the photo gallery for this guy :) thanks for reading my tutorials! Again any comments and questions are most welcomed! :)