Gunpla Build - High Grade Methuss (Build)

Before we get into the build, let’s take a little detour to talk about color.

What color is the Methuss? That depends. If you look at the lineart, it looks kind of orange.

But in Gundam Evolution, and on the boxart for this model, its more of a bright yellow:

And if look at it in Super Robot Wars, or in Zeta or ZZ Gundam, it’s more of a golden yellow. That’s my preferred color, and so that’s how I wanted my build to look.

Only one problem - the plastic in the box is straight orange:

My first thought was to try and take advantage of Simultaneous Color Contrast. We know that certain colors can appear darker or lighter based on what other colors they’re placed next to, like this:

Could I get the plastic to look golden yellow under the right conditions? First I took it outside:

Definitely orange.

Next I put it in the lightbox:

Now it’s even more orange.

Eventually I did manage to make it look golden yellow, but only when I placed it on the carpet:

I guess it’s nice to know that the Simultaneous Color Contrast Theory is real, but unless I want to give this Gunpla a permanent home on the floor, this doesn’t really help me.

That meant the next solution was to try and paint it. I went to the hobby store and got myself a can of spraypaint called “Camel Yellow”. It’s a little bit too orange for my liking, but it was the closest I could get to a golden yellow:

Unfortunately, after a few test sprays the results were negative. The plastic looked exactly as orange as when it was unpainted.

I went back to the hobby star to look for a different tone, and the only one I could find was an extremely bright yellow (simply named “Yellow”):

This ended up working better than I ever could have imagined. Sort of.

I forgot that yellow paint has very low opacity, and while this has often caused me problems in the past, this time it worked to my benefit. When it is applied to the orange plastic, some of the orange color still comes through - and when it blends with the paint, you end up with a gorgeous looking golden yellow.

But it’s not all sunshine and rainbows. It looks perfect on the first coat, but if you spray on additional coats (which I had to do on more than one occasion), or when the paint pools in the corners (which it will), it starts looking more like a straight yellow.

What this means is that the paint job on this model is … inconsistent. Patchy at times. The glow of the lightbox hides it in some cases, but if you look close enough you’ll see it.

If this were a case were I could have made it look better by applying multiple coats, I probably would have done so. But this was a really weird situation where that wasn’t the case, so all things considered I’m not going to beat myself up for how it turned out. I learned some important lessons, and hopefully I’ll do even better next time.

Build Notes

This build required a lot of color correction, as well as a decent amount of seamline removal. The latter was particularly tricky due to this being a semi-painted build. Consider this as an example:

In order to do this “correctly”, you have to:

• Put together the upper leg assembly (that’s the bit that’s plugged into the blue plastic)
• Remove the seamline on the upper leg assembly
• Paint it yellow
• Attach it to the blue plastic
• Assemble the rest of the yellow armor around the blue plastic
• Remove another seamline on the yellow armor
• Mask all of the blue plastic
• Spraypint the yellow armor
• Remove the masking tape and topcoat the whole thing

Not only is this a lot of work, but there’s a lot that can go wrong in the process. In some cases I went for it, but sometimes I simply pre-sprayed the yellow parts and put them together, leaving the seamlines be. Sometimes the effort didn’t seem worth it, especially when I thought it was likely it could go wrong.

Alright, now let’s get to the build.

Beam Sabers

The Methuss may have six beam sabers, but the kit only comes with two useable ones. They’re molded in grey plastic, so I’m going to assume that that’s the color they’re supposed to be.

Upper Torso

I’m not sure if this is 100% anime accurate. I think the upper torso looks a bit thicker than it does on the lineart, and my guess is that this may be so that the model is structurally sound.

Couple of notes:

• I did not do any seamline removal here, as I didn’t think they’d be too obvious
• I Painted the vents black, and used grey in the area around the arm sockets. The latter isn’t strictly necessary, but it looked to me like they did that in the instruction manual, and I thought it might look good that way
• We’ve got some stickers for the red square areas around the head

Lower Torso

The lower torso is nothing more than a giant scissor joint. You can paint the pistons if you want, and there’s some vents in the back to paint black. There’s also a seamline, but again, I figured it wasn’t going to be very visible on the finished model.

Head

I didn’t realize until building this just how much the Methuss’ head look like a Zaku. It’s not just the monoeye, but the general shape as well.

Here are my notes:

• I like the green tubing underneath the face. It’s another Zaku-esque design
• If you ever build this for yourself, I suggest adding some bright green paint over the green monoeye sticker. I find that the sticker on its own is too dark, and the eye is especially hard to see with that weird lens sitting in front of it
• The spraypaint didn’t dry evenly here, so I had to do some extra hand painting around the nose. It looks a bit crusty and uneven when viewed up close 🫢

Nosecone

This looks so beautiful. The only thing you might want/need to hand paint is the inside of the thrusters. There’s also one seamline (you can see it if you look closely enough). All in all, an easy part of the build.

Well, kinda. One thing to keep in mind is that you’re supposed to start attaching the nosecone to the torso as you’re assembling it, rather than afterward. If you attach it afterward, you might find it pretty hard to line it up and plug it in:

Arms and Shoulders

Believe it or not, this is almost the most complicated part of the build. I think the legs edge it out, but only barely.

Unfortunately, I don’t think my WIP photos really captured the build process well, but I’ve got to work with what I’ve got.

The top of the arm joint is basically sandwiched inside the shoulder:

What this means is that, try as you might, you’re never going to get the arm to pop off:

The green things on the shoulder are assembled by slapping a green sticker on a peg, and then fitting a cone on top:

The top cover slides onto the main assembly, while the side panel plugs into a grey polycap:

Now for the color correction. Here’s everything I painted:

The underside of the shoulder:

The inside of the cone:

All this stuff back here:

The area behind this green sticker:

Of these four areas, only the last one really feels necessary, but I think that together it all adds a nice sense of shading and color contrast. Without it, I think the shoulder assembly would look a bit too yellow overall.

Now let’s look at those big, chunky forearms. The beam pistols are color accurate, but these little screw-shaped things are not, so you’ll hae to paint those blue:

I also painted this recessed area where the beam pistols rest, though I’m not really sure if you need to:

Flipping it around, I also painted the inner wall as well:

With that all done, we have enough to assemble the top half of the Methuss:

So far so good.

Feet

These are nice and simple. Just a couple of big chunky parts and a hinge joint:

There are also some vents to panel line, and that’s all there is to it.

Legs

We already got a sneak preview of this earlier, but to reiterate, we start the upper legs:

Then we have the blue construct that goes inside of the lower leg:

The beam saber in the middle is an actual, removable one, while the other two are just details molded into the plastic, which meant of course that I had to paint them.

Then we have that photo we already saw:

Again, all of this is a huge pain to mask, so I didn’t bother.

Flipping it around to the other side, we have this hatch that can pop open, revealing a thruster inside:

There’s all sorts of little surface details in here that you can paint.

Moving around to the back, we can see all sorts of cool cabling and stuff:

But it’s not supposed to look like that. No, we have a rear cover we have to attach to (partially) cover it up:

Now we just fold it up and in, and it’s done:

Tada!!

Conclusion

This was a tough build. Between the spraypainting, seamline removal, masking, and color correction, not only was there a lot to do, but also a lot to keep track of, and there was a lot of time spent waiting for things to dry. By the end of it, it was starting to feel actually mentally taxing; indeed, the reason why I left some of the seamlines alone is simply because I got to a point where I wanted the build to end.

But now it’s all done, and despite some mistakes and some discolored paint, overall I’m still really happy with the effort. I hope you will be too.