An early Astray conversion, my first attempt at pre-shading, and the inconvenient discovery that paint makes rushed preparation easier to see, not harder.
Some old models tell you what you knew at the time. The more interesting ones tell you what you hadn’t learnt yet.
My 1/100 MBF-P03 Gundam Astray Blue Frame belongs firmly to the second group. I built it during the period when Gunpla was shifting from something I assembled into something I was beginning to actively shape. I wanted the relatively clean original Blue Frame, and the simplest route was to take a 1/100 Astray Red Frame and paint the exposed frame blue.
It wasn’t a radical conversion, but psychologically it mattered because I was beginning to understand that the plastic in the box was raw material rather than an instruction carved in stone. Unfortunately, confidence arrived somewhat earlier than patience, and the photographs still show that.
The Astray Appeal
The Astray family has always worked for me visually. Most Gundams cover their internal structure with armour, but the Astray leaves enough of its coloured mechanical skeleton exposed that the machine feels almost anatomical. The white armour seems to hang over tendons and bones.
That structural colour also gives each Astray a surprisingly distinct identity. Red Frame doesn’t merely look like Blue Frame painted red, and Blue Frame doesn’t simply feel like another colour variation. The frame becomes the character. I wasn’t coming to it primarily through the manga or the deeper layers of Cosmic Era lore; as usual, the design got to me first.
Turning Red Into Blue
The project began with an existing non-grade 1/100 Red Frame. I wanted the original MBF-P03 Blue Frame rather than the more heavily equipped Second L, so repainting the frame and changing the markings gave me the relatively clean machine I had in mind.
It was a modest act of customising, but at the time I was still negotiating what that word meant. I even wondered whether the result really qualified as an out-of-the-box build because the base kit technically represented another Astray. That feels rather innocent now. Eventually you realise Bandai supplies the plastic and what happens after you open the box is largely between you and the model.
Primer Removes the Character
My old blog documented priming, test-fitting, masking and painting, although not with the obsessive completeness I initially intended. There is something strangely satisfying about a Gunpla once primer removes all the original colour. Red, white, yellow and blue disappear into grey and the familiar character temporarily becomes pure shape.
For someone with a design background, I enjoyed that stage because it allowed me to see the object differently. Colour had always been one of the first things I noticed, so removing it forced attention back towards proportion and surface. Then, gradually, the colour returned.
My First Attempt at Pre-Shading
This build was my first serious experiment with pre-shading. The principle sounded easy enough: put a darker tone around edges and panel divisions, then spray the main colour over it in thin enough layers for some of that darkness to remain.
Watching somebody experienced do this gives the impression that the process is almost automatic. It isn’t. Too much contrast and the model looks outlined; too much top colour and the shading vanishes entirely. I was happy with my first attempt, and I still think that satisfaction matters more than whether I would execute it the same way now. Seeing a flat colour acquire subtle tonal depth felt like discovering another vocabulary. White was no longer simply white, and blue could contain a little atmosphere.
Masking Teaches Humility
Then came masking. Masking tape is an ordinary material that becomes strangely adversarial when applied to compound curves, tiny mechanical details and paint you are hoping will remain attached to the surface underneath it.
The hands were particularly irritating because of the alternating white and blue areas. Somebody on a Gundam forum suggested that instead of trying to mask every tiny division, I should paint the hands white and simply brush the blue sections afterwards. It seems obvious now. At the time it was extremely useful.
That was part of how the hobby internet worked then. You asked a question, somebody with a username you would never meet answered it, another person disagreed, and eventually you tried something on your own model. Knowledge arrived in fragments.
Paint Doesn’t Hide Preparation
The lesson I remember most clearly came afterwards. I had been so eager to get to painting that I hadn’t properly removed every nub mark and seam. Once the primer and colour were down, the imperfections didn’t disappear; they became easier to see.
It is one of the fundamental truths of painting anything: the surface underneath remains the surface underneath. Paint does not reward impatience. The photographs preserved the evidence, and I was fairly candid about it on the old blog. I could have photographed the model selectively and pretended everything was perfect, but the point at the time was learning. That honesty is one reason I’m glad the archive still exists.
The Dangerous Moment When It Starts Looking Finished
Every model seems to reach a stage where it becomes dangerous to the builder’s patience. This happens when enough colour and detail are in place that the finished object becomes visible in your head. At that point the brain decides the project should be complete immediately.
Decals get rushed, paint hasn’t quite cured and imperfections that would take five minutes to fix suddenly become things you convince yourself nobody will notice. Graphic design has the same problem. Once the main visual is working, checking the quieter parts becomes much less emotionally exciting. Craft is partly learning to finish the boring bits after the interesting part has already happened, and I wasn’t very good at that yet.
Phase Two, Eventually
I called the completed base machine Phase One. The plan was to move into a more ambitious Full Weapon Form, which would have required equipment that wasn’t conveniently available at 1/100 scale. That meant scratch-building.
I described this rather casually as dipping my toes into scratch building, which is the sort of sentence hobbyists write before spending three weekends measuring styrene. The unfinished Phase Two now feels almost as revealing as the completed model. Hobbyists are great believers in future time. There is always another weekend coming, and the project box is full of it.
Why Astray Stayed With Me
The Astray family continued to follow me through the hobby: Red, Blue, Gold, Green, Mirage and the increasingly elaborate variations that appeared whenever somebody realised another sword or backpack could be attached.
Underneath all that expansion, though, the original architecture remained strong. Lean proportions, broad but not bulky shoulders, long limbs and the coloured frame visible beneath white armour gave the design a character that survived the accessories. That is probably why this relatively simple Blue Frame still means something to me. It marks the point where I realised a kit didn’t have to remain whatever the box said it was.
Toys After the Fall
When I look at these photographs now, I could concentrate on the neglected seams or the slightly enthusiastic pre-shading. That would miss the point. What I see instead is the first time I tried the technique, the first time I treated the moulded colour as optional and one of the first occasions where my idea of the finished model began to matter more than the instructions.
Learning a craft changes the object first and then changes your eyes. After you notice a seam, you keep noticing seams; after you understand tonal variation, flat colour begins looking flat. That is the curse of knowing better, and age makes it slightly easier to live with.
I wouldn’t rebuild this Blue Frame now because fixing everything would erase much of what makes it useful as a document. Beneath the blue paint is still a Red Frame, and beneath the model are the layers of inexperience, excitement and impatience that produced it. Some models record where you arrived. Others show where you started heading somewhere else. This one did that in blue.
Photography: All photographs are from my original Side Cutter and the Plastic Fantastic archive and were photographed by me during the original build.
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