An old Facebook album led me back to a 2015 Gunpla build: a non-grade 1/100 ZAKU Warrior that began as a straightforward snap build and ended up becoming one of my first serious attempts at kitbashing, custom painting and weathering. Eleven years later, the rough edges are easier to see, but so is the point where I stopped simply assembling models and started trying to make them mine.
Before I Knew Better
There is something mildly archaeological about going through old Facebook photo albums now. You dig past birthdays, restaurant meals, forgotten links and whatever everyone was arguing about that particular year, then suddenly find eighty photographs of a plastic robot taken from every conceivable angle. At the time, of course, this seemed entirely reasonable.
That was how I came back to my old photographs of a non-grade 1/100 ZGMF-1000/M Blaze ZAKU Warrior, followed by the much more ambitious Custom Gunner ZAKU Warrior I eventually built from the same general family of kits. Looking at the photographs together now, they feel less like documentation of two separate models and more like a small record of where I was as a modeller. The first is essentially what I called it at the time: a snap build and a pic dump. The second is me beginning to wonder what would happen if I stopped accepting everything Bandai gave me in the box.
The photographs are all mine, taken at the time partly because photographing a finished kit was simply part of finishing it for me. In retrospect, I am glad I was excessive about it. Models disappear into boxes, pieces break, shelves get rearranged and entire hobbies can go into hibernation, but photographs remain. More than a decade later, these also preserve the things I might otherwise have forgotten: experiments that worked, those that did not, and the slightly reckless confidence required to start cutting into a perfectly serviceable model because you have decided its backpack is not complicated enough.
Starting with the ZAKU Warrior
I have always liked the ZAKU Warrior designs from Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Destiny. They obviously carry the visual DNA of the original Zaku, but they are not slavish reproductions. The basic vocabulary is still there — the mono-eye, rounded helmet, single shoulder shield, spiked armour and unmistakable mass-production silhouette — but everything has been translated into the sharper, busier visual language of the Cosmic Era.
The non-grade 1/100 kits suited me particularly well. They were large enough to have presence on a shelf and simple enough that I did not feel I was committing an act of sacrilege whenever I started experimenting with one. Compared with the increasingly sophisticated engineering we now take for granted in newer kits, they can feel fairly basic, particularly in articulation and internal construction, but that simplicity also leaves room for messing about. There is less machinery hidden inside telling you precisely how the model wants to be built.
My Blaze ZAKU Warrior began as exactly that sort of uncomplicated project. I assembled it, posed it and photographed it against a dark background, then later took another series against the pale blue backdrop I seemed rather fond of for model photography at the time. There was no elaborate plan behind it; it was simply a model I enjoyed looking at, and that straightforward pleasure still matters to me now.
Not every kit needs to become a six-month engineering project. Sometimes the pleasure genuinely is in opening the box, putting the thing together and finally seeing the illustration on the packaging standing three-dimensionally in front of you. Straight building sometimes gets treated as merely the larval stage before becoming a Serious Modeller armed with an airbrush, scribers, aftermarket parts and seventeen slightly different shades of grey, but I do not really see it that way anymore. A straight build teaches you the proportions of a design, and you learn what bothers you as well as, perhaps more importantly, what does not.
With this particular ZAKU, enough things eventually bothered me that the straight build became a useful baseline for something more ambitious. Photographing it from every angle also made the weak spots easier to notice, which is one of the slightly cruel side effects of model photography.
Then I Entered a Competition
The Custom Gunner ZAKU Warrior came out of my participation in the Tamiya Stargek M Con III in 2015. Reading my original description now is rather amusing because I was practically apologising before anyone had even looked at the model. I described myself as a noob compared with the other entries and admitted that this was one of my early attempts at modification and customisation, which probably was not false modesty so much as an accurate description of where I was at the time.
There was not a grand master plan at the beginning either. The decision to use the kit came relatively late, which meant I did not have the luxury of completely rebuilding its articulation or undertaking the kind of structural modifications I might have attempted with several more months available. Instead, I concentrated on the outside. If I could not radically change how the ZAKU moved, I could change what it carried and how it looked.
This was also where model building began drifting into territory that felt familiar from design work. You start with an existing visual system and ask how far you can push it before the thing stops feeling like itself. I did not want to create something that no longer looked like a ZAKU Warrior; I wanted something that looked as though somebody within that fictional military might actually have modified it — heavier, more specialised and perhaps slightly over-equipped, but still unmistakably descended from the original machine. Naturally, this meant giving it an enormous backpack.
The Backpack Became the Build
The standard Gunner Wizard already gives the ZAKU Warrior a reasonable amount of hardware, but I modified the backpack so it could incorporate another unit taken from a 1/100 SEED Vs. Astray Hail Buster Gundam kit. I also used MS Funnel 01 Model Builders Parts, 1/100 MS Spike Model Builders Parts on the shoulder and assorted smaller mechanical components. There is a particular stage in custom modelling when you are no longer entirely certain whether you are designing something or simply discovering how many components can be attached before gravity becomes part of the brief.
Looking at the rear photographs now, I remember why this sort of work was so enjoyable. The back of the completed model is almost as visually busy as the front. Cylinders, weapon housings, thrusters, piping, shields and hard-edged machinery gather around the relatively simple ZAKU body until the entire silhouette becomes substantially heavier. The bright red cable running through the backpack helps enormously as well; it is not subtle, but subtlety was not exactly the objective. Against all the military greens, blacks, greys and metallic surfaces, that single line of colour creates a focal point and visually connects the backpack with the smaller red details elsewhere on the suit.
There is also something pleasingly old-fashioned about the process. I was not designing components in CAD or printing perfectly engineered adapters. This was essentially kitbashing: going through available pieces, recognising forms that might work together and physically persuading them to cooperate. That remains one of the most creative parts of model building for me because you stop seeing a component purely as whatever the manufacturer says it is. A Gundam backpack becomes machinery for a ZAKU, a Builder’s Part intended for one purpose becomes armour or a thruster, and design becomes a matter of rummaging through the bits box and seeing what survives the argument. I have done worse professionally.
Finding the Colour Scheme
The original Blaze ZAKU Warrior wears a much paler military palette, but the custom version went substantially darker. I settled on deep green armour with near-black sections, metallic details and rusty orange accents. The result has considerably more weight than the straight build and, looking back, probably says as much about my tastes at the time as it does about anything in the Gundam universe. I liked machines that looked used, although not necessarily destroyed or buried beneath theatrical layers of mud; I wanted something that suggested operation, maintenance, repair, scratches and a return to service.
[IMAGE 07 — Front close-up showing chest, head and weathering]
Caption: Dark greens, black armour and rusty wear transformed the character of the original kit far more than I expected. It stopped looking like a clean production machine and began looking like somebody’s machine.
Alt text: Close-up of the head and torso of a dark green custom ZAKU Warrior with orange-brown paint wear and metallic details.
The markings and small orange details helped reinforce that feeling, particularly the 89 identification numbers appearing across the armour and equipment. Whether every decal made impeccable fictional military sense was not really the point. They gave the machine an identity and separated it from the anonymous production model I had started with. The black torso also changes how I read the proportions, visually compressing the centre of the body while allowing the green skirt armour, shoulders and legs to carry more of the silhouette. Combined with the enlarged backpack, the ZAKU suddenly looks denser and much more heavily equipped.
This was also one of my earlier attempts at custom panel lining, and I can see myself learning where additional detail helps and where it simply becomes more detail. That is one of the useful things about returning to old creative work: you can recognise your habits from before you had enough experience to recognise them yourself.
The Terrifying Business of Weathering
The part I was most uncertain about was weathering. I had completed the paintwork and modifications and could quite easily have stopped there, because the model already looked dramatically different from the original. Weathering, though, is one of those stages where several weeks of perfectly respectable work can suddenly become considerably less respectable in about twenty minutes, and after some hesitation I eventually decided to take the risk.
The rust-coloured wear around the torso and skirt armour, chips along exposed edges and grime across the equipment were my attempt to make the machine feel less like freshly painted plastic. Some areas work better than others. Looking closely now, I can certainly see places where I would use a lighter hand, and even at the time I wrote that I was not entirely satisfied with the results and needed to read more about advanced weathering techniques.
I am rather glad I left that admission in the original album. Creative work has a peculiar tendency to acquire mythology once enough time has passed: experiments turn into intentional stylistic choices, accidents become discoveries and the slightly dodgy section gets quietly cropped out. The old photographs do not really allow me that luxury. There I am in 2015 essentially saying that I tried something, was not entirely happy with it and would have to get better at it, which is probably a healthier record of making things than pretending everything formed part of an immaculate artistic journey.
Building Somewhere for It to Exist
The other element I had almost forgotten was the display environment. Alongside the finished ZAKU photographs are numerous pictures of the industrial hangar-style backdrop and base: dark metal panels, structural framing, worn flooring, orange-brown corrosion, machinery and equipment surrounding the mobile suit. The model becomes substantially more convincing once placed inside that environment because the base gives the weathering somewhere to belong. Without context, chipped paint is simply chipped paint; inside a maintenance bay, it becomes part of a world.
I spent quite a bit of time photographing the environment separately, including equipment mounted along the rear wall and the heavily worn floor. Those photographs remind me how close model building can get to miniature production design. You are deciding what sort of place this is, what materials surround the subject, where wear accumulates and what kind of machinery might logically be lying around, even though none of that needs to be written down for the viewer.
There is no screenplay explaining why the ZAKU is parked there. You simply make enough visual decisions that the viewer begins filling in the story. That was probably one of the things that kept me interested in model making beyond simply assembling Gundams, because by this stage I was not only building a robot; I was constructing a photograph.
The Camera Changes the Model
Photographing a model is merciless. The human eye is surprisingly forgiving when you are holding something in your hand, while a camera will cheerfully point out mould seams, rough paint, dust, crooked decals and the tiny part you somehow forgot to finish despite staring directly at it for three weeks. At the same time, photography can make a model feel much larger than it actually is, particularly when you get close enough for the surrounding room and the scale cues to disappear.
The close-ups from these albums remain some of my favourite pictures because they stop immediately reading as photographs of a plastic kit. The head, shoulder armour, chest weathering and backpack details begin behaving more like pieces of machinery. Even the exaggerated proportions of the ZAKU become more convincing once the frame removes the reminder that the entire thing could sit comfortably on a desk.
I clearly photographed this one obsessively: front, rear, three-quarter views, backpack details, shoulders, legs, weapons, markings, hangar shots and clean-background photographs. At the time it probably felt like documentation, but eleven years later those photographs effectively are the model in many respects. I do not have to remember exactly how the paint looked because the pictures do.
What I Notice Eleven Years Later
Looking at the original snap-built Blaze ZAKU Warrior beside the customised version now, what strikes me is not whether the second model is technically better. Obviously more work went into it: custom paint, modification, additional hardware, weathering and a dedicated display environment. What matters more is that I can see the point where the hobby changed for me. The straight build is about enjoying somebody else’s design; the customised ZAKU is about beginning a conversation with it.
I was beginning to ask why a shape had to remain exactly as it came in the box, whether a backpack from another kit could belong there, whether the colours could be pushed somewhere darker and whether a mass-produced machine could acquire enough individual character to stop looking mass-produced. None of that was particularly advanced by competition-modelling standards. There were builders then, just as there are now, doing astonishing structural conversions, scratch-building components and creating finishes I could not begin to match, and I knew that at the time, which probably explains the slightly apologetic tone of my original album description.
Competitions are not useful only because somebody wins. Sometimes they simply give you an excuse to attempt something you are not quite ready for, and that is probably the more useful way for me to remember this one.
The Odd Value of Old Builds
I no longer look at old models primarily as catalogues of things I could improve. I could certainly improve this one: I would approach the weathering differently today, simplify a few areas, rethink certain details and probably spend more time resolving how the additional backpack integrates with the original design. Given another attempt, I would inevitably make another dozen decisions differently, but mentally rebuilding your own past work can become a fairly joyless exercise.
I would rather leave this ZAKU where it belongs. It records me learning how to customise a model by actually customising one rather than endlessly researching techniques until I felt qualified to begin. It contains awkward bits, questionable judgement, things I would not do now and several decisions I still quite like, which makes it a considerably more useful object than something retrospectively perfected.
Somewhere inside this archive is also the much simpler Blaze ZAKU Warrior that came before it: clean, straightforward and happily snap-built. One model did not invalidate the other. The first showed me what Bandai had designed, while the second was when I started asking what I could do with it.
Photography note
All model, detail and diorama photographs featured in this article were photographed by me and come from my original build archive.
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