At the time of writing this, it's April 2022 and I think it's fair to say that nowhere in the world is it Summer at the moment; regardless, that hasn't stopped Plamolabs from launching our 2nd iteration of our own internal competition: Summer Slam. The rules of the competition are simple: to enter you need to be an active member of Plamolabs as of November 2021 and that participants need to post their progress shots, engaging the community. As its a competition, there will be prizes for the Top 3 finishes. I'd like to take this opportunity to thank the sponsors for their respective prizes: Omni Earth, ShowMeWhatYouBot, MCModel Shop, NoStarToys and Mourne.One. There are no limits to the amount of entries but each participant can only win once. Entries must not be started before 7th January 2022 and must be submitted by 31st May 2022.
On to the build, obviously this Hyaku Shiki Kai Mass Production Type (MPT) is my first entry to the competition. I say first because I am planning to submit at least 2 entries, just for fun! The Hyaku Shiki is my old time favourite mobile suit - despite it being all gold, which on the Strike Freedom comes across as tacky, the Shiki is a really elegant looking mobile suit. I'm making it a personal goal to own all the MG Shiki variants so I'm just needing the P-Bandai Shiki Kai (non Mass Produced version) last. I've built this frame twice now and I've not gotten tired of it yet, which bodes well as I'll have to build at least 3 more before I'm done.
I decided to keep things simple as always. So I just did the basic clean up and went the extra mile to make sure that all surfaces were prepped properly, so that meant dealing with all the sinks in the plastic. With regards to the paintjob, I decided to go with a two-tone inner frame with the typical dark grey and a more greenish-grey. See if you can identify the different colours of the frame. For the external armour, I wanted to do something different that's not the typical Shiki gold so I went with this test type colour scheme with the gold and grey. I'm actually quite glad with how it turned out and its just another colour scheme that works with the Shiki! I chose this scheme because I wanted it to look a little more utilitarian so aside from the orange and yellows; everything else on this kit used grey as a base. If you count the inner frame and weapons, there's actually 8 different greys on this kit!
One thing I wanted to point out were the pistons on the Shiki Kai's shins. I actually went through quite a few iterations before settling on this one. I had some help from another Plamolabs member Vork who provided some sample images and this CAT yellow one really caught my attention. It provided a nice complement to the grey and is actually one of three orange/yellows on the kit! All of the colours are custom mixes so leave a comment below if you guys are interested to know what my mixes are.
Finally, I used a mix of waterslide decals from the stock P-Bandai kit and also some from the Evo/SIMP Shiki Crash/Raise Cain decal sheet.
Check out the gallery below for more images! There's also a little mock-up I did of a fake magazine cover featuring this Shiki Kai right at the end. Tell me what you think about and if I should do more fun things like that!
