MG Blue Frame : Inverse

Submitted By: Steven Wong

Have you ever wondered, what a gunpla would look like with it’s colors completely inverted.  It’d look like it’s own negative image wouldn’t it? Would that look good? Could it even be done?

Well just thinking logically there really is no reason why you shouldn’t be able to pick up just about any model see the color of the plastic and find the complimentary color, there’s a color wheel for that and that’d give you the inverse color.

Unfortunately as it turns out such is not the case.  First off many gunpla have clear colored parts,  As of the time of writing this I am not aware of a method to change the color of a clear part without loosing the transparency, well Short of remolding the part yourself, not something I was prepared to do.  Therefore a model with little to no clear parts is needed.

A second problem occurs trying to find a colors exact opposite, a color wheel will tell you for instance that the compliment(opposite) of red for example is green.  Well if you use the invert function of any art program you’ll soon discover that the real compliment of red is cyan….problem…..where do I find cyan paint?  Ok Lets go for a model with no red.  Just about every gundam in existance has atleast a small bit of red so gundams are out, so is Sazabi and Sinanju.

For those of you wondering yes Cyan paint does exist, it’s just a real hassle to get, or atleast for me, if you’re in a better position then this obviously isn’t a consideration for you, lucky you.  In my current situation, having no access to cyan paint I went looking for a gunpla with no red and limited clear parts. and I found it in the Astray Blue Frame, and as an added bonus he has a really really nice sword, score, lucky me.

Having selected my model I needed to determine the inverse colors.  Photoshop helped with that. additionally I had a chat with a friend and the notion of metalic paints came up, Well now there’s a concept onto a concept. Metallic means gloss, sure you can do it matt/flat but that kinda defeats the purpose of going metallic, most gundams by convention are done matt/flatt, a convention I’m not particularly fond of to begin with, but that’s a story in and of itself.

Now my blue frame wasn’t just inverted colors it ws inverted finishes and metallic just as an added bit of fun.
To finish up the effect I decided to do white panel lining.

All planning now complete I was anxious to see how this concept would actually translate to reality.  in so doing I kinda rushed things and in the pics(credit to a friend of mine who has a sweet camera, and photoshop which lets me shrink them to an acceptable size, and invert them as well) you may see some of my errors, and probably will.  additionally the white lining doesn’t come through as well as I had hoped, but all said and done I think it turned out really nicely.

Some final notes in closing,  I choose not to use the decals or stickers since I didn’t want anything of the original colors to be showing, astray blue frame actually has two colors on his fingers but that’s not molded seperately(doh!), gold and silver metallic paint don’t contrast with each other as much as I had thought they would, metallic blue green is more green than expected, and there is as far as I can tell no such thing as metallic white, but silver works well enough.

That’s it for this post hope this somehow inspires your creativity, or maybe you’d just like to try what I did, I probably wasn’t the first to try it anyways.