Folks, I am happy to report that the High Grade ZII does, in fact, have very good color separation. It’s not perfect, mind you, but it’s got it where it counts.
Which isn’t to suggest that there’s no extra work to be done, just that it’s way, way better than it could have been.
Let’s start with a look at the runners and the stickers, and we’ll go from there:
It’s funny - when I look at this photo, it doesn’t seem like this kit has a lot of parts, but I know from having just built it that it has quite a lot going on.
A few observations:
- There’s one whole runner dedicated to nothing but weapons, which is always a welcome sight
- The lineart of the ZII is made to look like the suit uses orange instead of yellow, but no, it was yellow all along
- Since this is a High Grade kit, the transformation into Wave Rider mode is a “partsformation”, where there a bunch of specialty parts you have to swap in. In the case of this kit, there’s a decimated fighter craft fuselage that is used just for Wave Rider mode. You basically take a bunch of the body parts off the Gunpla, (re)attach them to the fuselage, and you’re done. It’s a simple solution
Now let’s zoom in on the sticker sheet:
There are a lot of color correcting stickers, but in this case that’s a good thing. The mobile suit has lots of little yellow markings all across its body, as well as a few on its beam rifle, and this sticker sheet accounts for all of them. If you’ve ever had to use yellow paint against blue plastic, you’ll know that this is a huge win.
Other than that, the only other color correcting stickers of note are the four red ones. These are the only time that this kit uses red stickers; all other red on the mobile suit is made out of glorious plastic.
Alright, with all that said, it’s time to finally get to the build.
Clay Bazooka(s)
As far as I can tell this is the same simple design used in all sorts of other High Grades, including my own Dijeh. That means it has a nasty seamline running down the center, which I did my best to sand down. I then blasted the whole thing with grey spraypaint to try and hide it away:
The Clay Bazooka is a favorite of mine, so I’m thrilled that this thing comes with two of them.
Mega Beam Rifle
For whatever reason, very few Zeta Gundam model kits come with the Mega Beam Rifle. But while it was a late addition to the Zeta’s arsenal, it appears to be a signature weapon for the ZII, so thankfully we get one here.
I’ve always known that it was a big gun, but you can’t really appreciate it until you see it in person. Let’s just say that it’s longer than most High Grades are tall:
Like the Clay Bazooka, this gun has a nasty seamline running down the center, so you can do with that as you please. In terms of color correction, the manual shows that both the muzzle and the power cable are a darker shade of grey than the rest of the gun, which is easy enough to do.
Beam Rifle
This is my first time assembling a High Grade version of the Zeta Beam Rifle, and I like it a lot. The seamline is largely hidden, and it has a lot of great surface detail.
However, this gun is famously two-toned, so if you want it looking right you’ll need to bust out your black paint and masking tape. Not ideal, but I’ve dealt with worse.
Head
The head is largely similar in appearance to the Zeta’s, though possibly even sharper and more dagger like.
It also doesn’t have vulcan cannons, for whatever that’s worth.
But what I find truly fascinating is that the V-Fin reminds me of the antler-esque horns of the Zeong:
Chest
The cross section of the chest looks an awful lot like the ASCII shoulder shrug - ¯_(ツ)_/¯
There’s quite a lot of surface detail along the waist, and of course you’ll need to fill in the center of the chest vents with black. Best to bring out our panel lining markers for this one.
And then of course are the long antenna-shaped fins coming off of its shoulders. I’m not sure if they has any sort of functional purpose - maybe they’re stabilizer fins for Wave Rider mode? - but it certainly looks cool.
Lower Torso
It … um … kind of looks like the ZII has a comically large schlong that it’s doing a very poor job of tucking away:
Things are a bit more tame on the backside. We get a fairly large thruster (that needs to be painted grey for color accuracy):
And that’s it for the lower torso; the side skirts attach to the legs, so we’ll look at those later.
Backpack
This is made out of two sections; the thrusters and the nosecone.
The thrusters are, surprisingly, color accurate out of the box, in part thanks to those little yellow marking stickers:
(Side note - I’m not sure if I spilled something on the sticker sheet, or if these particular stickers were particularly delicate, but they started to tear apart almost as soon as I peeled them off the backing paper)
Next is the nosecone, which is also color accurate:
This is the only instance on the model where we have to apply a sticker to a nonflat surface, and it goes without saying that it looks the worst of the bunch. But it’s still better than having to use yellow paint on blue plastic (though we will have to do that eventually. Just not here)
Feet
A lot of mobile suits have high heeled feet, but these right here are practically stilettos:
Now, you might assume that that was a photo of the foot tucked and closed for use in Waver Rider mode - and you’d be wrong. This is what it looks like tucked and closed:
We’ll have to wait and see if these heels are stable enough to keep the model standing.
Interestingly, there are no thrusters on the bottoms of the feat, or really much of any sort of detail. It’s by far the simplest body part on the mobile suit.
Legs
This is where we finally have to do some real color correction.
The legs are littered with yellow and black vents, but this one that I’m pointing at is the only one made out of yellow plastic:
All the other ones have to hand painted, which means applying yellow paint to dark blue plastic, and then adding black (or grey) on top of that.
I’m not going to say that my work is incredible, but it’s good enough for my needs. The trick was to start with a layer of white paint, and then add a layer of yellow on top of that. It did a good job of keeping the color of the blue plastic underneath from bleeding through.
In addition to all the painting, we have some yellow stickers, as well as those red stickers we saw at the start of the build. We also get the side skirts, which are nicely color separated out of the box.
Arms and Shoulders
We have some more thrusters on the shoulders that needed to be painted. Since it’s a much larger surface area, it was easer to do relative to the legs. We also get some more nice red plastic arounds the wrists.
Seamlines and Other Notes
There are a bunch of seamlines throughout the body of the mobile suit. I’ll try to list them all here (though you can probably see some of them in the photos above):
- The fronts of the legs
- The tops of the shoulders
- The underside of the thrusters
- The upper arms
- The underside of the nosecone
It sounds like a lot, but they’re all flat surfaces, which makes them a lot easier to work on. Not to mention that some of them are so small that you could honestly get away with ignoring most of them if you wanted to. They’re just not as egregious as the ones on the weapons.
One final note for this build - all of the AEUG and Anaheim logos on this model are waterslides I had lying around. They don’t come with the kit.
Finished
That’s it for the build. We’ll take a look at some photos later, but for now I will say that the final model doesn’t look quite the same as the lineart. For lack of a better word, I find the lineart to look a little too squished, while the Gunpla has much more normal, more Zeta-like proportions. It’s a good thing, and we’ll talk about it more in the next post.