hey everybody it's known from testing and I thought be fun this week to do a
little bit of a Show and Tell of some of the collectibles and objects I have in
my office space as well as model behavior project which we really haven't
done or shown since we've been working from home in the lockdown
now I am a big collector of six scale figures of mecca of gundam of all sorts
of toys and I wanted to put a spotlight on one of the companies I really really
love now you may remember about six years ago Adam and I showed off this
really beautiful undead cosmonaut figures orange spacesuit had the skull
inside and that was based off of the work of Ashley Wood and artists who
created this line of figures called three a the world of 3/8 it took his
unique style of Mecca of this post-apocalyptic robotic wasteland and
then turned those into these wonderfully detailed poseable mixed-media toys now
those of you follow the collectibles business may have heard that as of last
summer last July ash wood announced that he was shutting down 3a and so Wow I
still gonna create art there would be no more of those figures but fortunately
the company that makes the toys which is a spin-off of 3a called 3-0 still exists
and inherited all the licenses from things that they've been working on like
ash Woods interpretation of Marvel characters Iron Man spider-man oh I love
that Spiderman mecha - more recent licenses like transformers
and one of my favorite interpretations of Transformers came from the
live-action bumblebee film that Travis Knight
directed a couple of years ago and so that's what we're gonna show off today
these were first released under the three a brand but now you can find them
on places like sideshow collective or a big bad toy store you search under
three zero and this is their line of what they call DLX scale figures now
because transformers aren't the size of humans it's not like one-sixth scale is
12 inches you know 1/10 or 1/12 scale six inches it's just it's called DLX
scale which is the smaller of the two scales they're working with even though
somebody's list is already about nine inches tall they're gonna also make one
of these I think it's like 15 inches tall that's way out of budget and space
for what I have but I am such a big fan of this interpretation of bumblebee and
this figure specifically it is diecast not also zinc metal as you find in many
like hot toys diecast pieces extremely poseable something that's always been a
hallmark of the 3a and 3-0 toy lines is the poise ability and because they're
robots that can hide so much of that joint work inside the physical design of
the toy of the characters so even things like the knee here that's completely
poseable you have things like even the toe right here very very sturdy it's one
of those things they actually have to be kind of careful when even posing it
because of how rigid these pieces are if you turn like a shoulder a certain way
some of the pieces can bump into each other and so you sometimes have the pop
out a shoulder piece and then get in but you have all this rotation lots of
interchangeable accessories so you do get things like an alternate bumblebee
head there are lights inside his head as well but the head lamps don't
unfortunately light up that's just clear plastic and one of my favorite things
also about their production is just the paint job I think they do an astounding
job with the quality of the paint finish not only for the metallic parts but also
on this candy coated car paid the weathering on there if you look you can
just see that grime that looks like my mold bees and you know stepping right
into out of a a battle scene and it just builds up in
all the right places and it's just a consistency and a
quality here that I think is some of the best I've seen
it doesn't transform and that's you know fine compromise I think it would be very
difficult for them to design this to actually transform and retain this level
of detail and after I picked this bumblebee up I had to pick up some of
the other ones as well and I think just just release this one's amazing is of
course Optimus it is such a better interpretation of Optimus than in the
first few live-action Transformers films I think Travis Nights just his his
appreciation for the gen 1 transformers design I think really comes through here
but very modernized as well you see all that mechanical detail in the places
that you would never see in the cell you know in the cell cartoon but including
the back here ah this is just a wonderful wonderful interpretation of
transformers but my favorite one actually is the Decepticon and it's
split swing I saw this at comic-con last year and when I did was walking through
the floor and I said I gotta pick this up and so this is blitz wing of course
this set in the early 90s so he's a f4 phantom to jet as well as I think a tank
as well he's only in the film for like you know the first major earth battle
but just an incredible incredible design it has actually a lot of and with the
paint scheme a lot of a Gundam characteristics that I really like and
this one's about 11 inches tall again extremely poseable diecast
accessories you swap out his blaster here for the hand very posable lights in
here as well as well has wings but one thing I noticed when I opened this out
of the box and started posing and taking photographs of him was that I thought
while the paint job was incredible it could be even more weathered even grimy
er even more buildup of the illusion of dirt and oil and rust
so the model behavior today is taking Blitzwing and putting some oil paint on
him now that may sound blasphemous to some of you out there we're spending you
know 150 upwards of $200 on a collectible to then put more paint on it
but I'm here to tell you that is totally fine don't be so precious about it you
can make this more your own and in fact painting these type of collectibles is
some of the easiest ways to get into weathering as a practice because the the
most of the works already done if you look at how great these characters look
in these figures look out of the box they're ninety ninety-five percent the
way there all you're doing is adding that extra bit of you know grime and you
can go as far as you want and the great thing is these come pre seals you're not
going to be taking off any of the original work if you make a mistake with
the oil paint if you go direction that you don't feel completely happy with you
can always just use some paint thinner and getting wipe that right off and you
won't damage the original paint job so if you've watched past episodes of model
behavior you'll know that weathering with oil paints is super easy super
forgiving and really satisfying a process you've seen us do it before on
the show you've seen Adam do it recently on his live streams but all you need are
a couple paint brushes some oil paint I chose some black and some burnt umber
some paint thinner and rags or paper towels to wipe off some of those washes
and well let's take a look at the process
so before I got started one of the things I did was do some test painting
on one of the accessories which I recommend because if you're nervous
about committing the paint to the figure itself but how it may interact with the
existing paint finish did you never know how the the sealing worked and one of
the great things about working with the figure and collectible like this is that
there are plenty of accessories and so I just took one aside put some oil paint
on that wiped it all and it worked really well which gave me confidence to
then go right to Blitzwing here and I started with his wings because there's
nice big pieces that I knew I wanted to get extra grime onto the rivets in the
back and if it was a place that I ended up being not super happy with it wasn't
prominently displayed in the front of the figure the application process is
really simple putting some paint onto a pallet you don't need to use a lot a
little bit does go a long way and I'm putting a little bit of paint on the
brush and then dipping it into my little canister of paint thinner and not using
a ton of paint thinner and I think a lot of this is finding that balance between
how much you want to thin your oil paint and then how then that might apply on to
the surface you're working on
I'm pushing a lot of the oil into the corners into the crevices painting over
these these seam lines places where I think there will be grime and there
should be grime to build up and then also letting it sit for a little bit
before then wiping it off with a paper towel in most cases when working with
either figures like these characters or things like spaceships there's gonna be
a lot of cemetry you're gonna have two halves with a lot of similar parts on
the left and right side and so one thing I'm keeping your mind as I'm going
through this is working on both sides at the same time so that I can match the
left on the right side not just do one side first and then try to match it but
go with one wing and then the other wing and then move on one arm the other arm
one leg the other leg and so on I'm using basically just one brush for this
process and mixing with the block mixing it with the bird number thing in and out
as I go and then I have a second brush here that's really more for just the
paint thinner and if there are places where I've let the oil sit for too long
and it's building up in a uneven way or maybe it's built up into a nook and
cranny that's really tough to get my rag or paper towel into that I can use the
second brush dip it in a little bit of paint thinner and use it to move the oil
around so make it a little bit more even and this is where I use to really blend
the edges of the oil so it looks like it's something that's part of the
original paint job as well
one thing you can easily do that I'm not doing here is do some oil streaks now if
you're painting something like a droid or an old vehicle that's supposed to
look like the oil or wine is kind of drip down the sides again super easy
similar process where you can use one brush and just draw a streak down
vertically kind of along gravity where liquid would be going down let it sit
for a couple minutes and then taking a second brush dipping it in some paint
thinner and then using that to kind of thin out that streak and make it look
like a very light streak and blending it with those base coats and the previous
coats of paint put anything
like I mentioned 90 to 95% of the work is already there most cases I'm not
trying to remove the existing weather and I'm trying to add to it and find
places where in their manufacturing process I thought they could have used a
little bit more weather or maybe trying to hide a mold line from the die cast
injection molding that may be popping up and in here there and hide some of those
seams and looking at the color blocking because a character like Blitzwing here
he has these old Reds that stand out against basically two or three tones of
gray and light gray but there's not a lot of brown in here so while I don't
want to overwhelm the paint job with what would look like rust
there are definitely places where I think it needs a little bit of a spot of
Browns just add some more depth to the color palette
so after about an hour hour and a half of weathering I am so much happier with
how Blitzwing looks and I think the difference really shows in some of the
close-ups and in the photos I'm able to take of this character and oil is super
forgiving so if you know a day later or you're looking at it and there are
different light conditions or pictures of your camera or your phone and you
realize ah maybe I put too much or maybe the color balance doesn't really work
you can always just take some paint thinner you can always still move some
of the oil around and you can hide a lot of those crimes or undo a lot of what
you did if you're not happy with it but I'm super pleased with how this turned
out and once again just so impressed by the quality of work the level of detail
the paint finish out of the box engineering and the manufacturing
quality of this line of DLX figures from 3-0 now formerly 3a for the transformers
license go check them out and there are other figures that they put out and I'd
love to see the paint jobs that you put on your own model making projects
whether their existing figures that already come painted out of a box or
things like Gundam or whatever you're working on I hope you enjoyed this and
we'll be back next time with more shown tales and more projects thanks for
watching I'll see you next time bye you