About The Kit »

Now normally I would never do an HGUC, but this isn’t a normal HGUC release. This is the HGUC Hazel from the Advance of Zeta
series which runs in the Japanese Dengeki Hobby Magazine. What sold me on this smaller Gundam was the amount of detail which Bandai put into it. The hands for one are fantastic. If only Bandai supplied these sort of hands for their MG line-up.

This was done for the AoZ Unlimited Group Build on my forum. When I recieved the kit I fully expected lots of seam lines to deal with, but unlike most HGUC’s this kit had very few. The majority of them were on the arms which required them to be constructed prior to painting. The others were the gun which is to be expected of many Gundam release regardless of grade.

To make construction easier, I painted the internals first. This was done in Alclad Steel. I absolutely love the color for joints and internals. The durability of the paint helps as well when posing the kit. I built and masked the elbow joints then added the arms which I sanded/puttied/sanded some more before painting them. This was easier than having to reposition the arms to make sure
the elbow joint was completely painted.

The overall color scheme is a custom one I designed. I like the stock scheme a lot, but wanted to do something different. I wanted
a lighter blue and more ellow-orange highlights. The decals were designed and printed by Models4U who did an excellent job as always.

One new thing I tried with this kit was using a wash for the panel lines. I used a mixture of Tensochrom Oil and Brown acrylic
washes. I like the look in general as it’s much lighter, but don’t like the bleedy edges you sometimes get with a wash.

Overall, I really enjoyed building this kit and would recommend it to anyone as a starter kit as it’s got a small number of parts, little seams to fill, and is an easy build.

10.03.2005 » Concepts

I normally try to not put off current
projects and start kits as soon as I get them,
but this little guy was too cool to leave on the
shelf. This is the HGUC Hazel from the Dengeki
Hobby Series ‘Advance of Zeta’. I’ll be doing
this for the second group build (AoZ
Unlimited) on my forum.

I rather like the original colors
for this kit (scheme A), but still want to modify
them a bit to suit my taste. I’ll be using a sky-blue
similar to that on my Cloud
09. I’ll also be doing a combination of white
and off-white instead of all off-white. This is
scheme B as seen below. I also particularly like
scheme C and the variation H, but perhaps I’ll
use that on another kit.

The other schemes are just ones
I was playing with for fun. D and E are similar
to the canon colors for the Hazel and F and G
are just what the Hazel might look like in a Char
or First Gundam scheme. I actually like scheme
G. I did it to be funny, but it still looks kinda
cool.

Build-wise, I’m past where you see
in the photo below. I have all the parts cut out
and most are fully sanded. I’ll have to paint
all of the joint parts first which I’ll be using
Alclad Steel for. Then I’ll add the armor parts
that need to cover those before seams can be fixed.
Since I’ll be using Lacquer paint for the joints
before painting the armor with Tamiya Acrylics,
I can easily clean-up any Tamiya that got oversprayed
with alcohol without damaging the Lacquer paint
below.

In the pic you can see how I’ve
separated the parts while cutting them out and
sanding. The chest/torso parts are in one container,
arms in another, legs, etc… Makes it easier
when adding them to skewer and figuring out what
needs what colors later.