Modelling 101: Don't bite off more than you can chew

Hello Ladies and Gents ( if there is any ladies at all that read my blog post). Welcome to another post from the hummingbird.

Right, in this post, I would love to talk about another basic thing junior modeler need to know. And its basically about ''biting off more than you can Chew''.

That's right folks, ''Biting off more than you can chew''. It can happen, it will happen and it happened to me. Ruined a 1/144 Freedom and a 1/100 Heavy Arm and not to mention, I'm living in a country where Gunpla is very hard to come by.

Before I go on, have a look at my failures owning to my mistake of biting off more than I can chew.

As you an see, these are the result of me biting off more than I can chew. The Freedom, I bought it back in 2008 and I saw White Base's freedom and inspired by it. The Heavy Arm, I got it in early 2009 and was inspired to MG-fied this thing. 

I started Gunpla at late 2007 and the freedom was like my third gunpla since I started and there was only a limited resources to which I can access. In short, I had no idea what the hell I was doing or how to do thing. I was just inspired by other's great build that I wanted to do something like that. I was 18 back then, that also speaks a lot, as I was still very young and just wanted to copy something great. And boy, I did copy with out proper learning, proper practice and all I got was failure. But that didn't discouraged me, it fueled me to learn from them. Of course, those two models became wastes.

Its true gunpla is very addictive and inspiration is very very important. But perceiving inspiration in the wrong way can result in disaster. For a young and aspiring modeler, seeing so much inspiring builds can and will fuel him to try to be like his inspiration, be it modding a kit or painting kit. 

If that's that case, I just want to say this - Take things slow. Research, Ask around, read tutorials and practice first. For instance, lets take MatX for example. He does great modding job. One would (and surely be) inspired by his crazy, awesome, out-worldly modding. And from that inspiration, would come drive to mod and without proper practice, thinking one can do it,  one will start cutting up his gunpla, only to find that it is near impossible to get even a fraction of the modding done. Evidently from my past photo, that exactly happened to me. I didn't research enough and I went ahead and BAM, Failure. I bit off more than I can chew and I was left with two crap. 

I seriously don't want my juniors to go through what I have gone through as it is quite painful and a massive waste of money. So, please, take it from a man who went through this, do not DO NOT bite off more than you can chew.

I hope this post have been nice and educating to read. If you require any thing regarding gunpla, please don't hesitate to ask me and even if you ask me something that is not my expertise, I can refer you to my friends who know more. 

Thank you all for reading and as ever, thank you for your ever lasting support. 

Stay Tuned until the next update.

Edit - to add to this post, A great great modeler by the name of Matt Tomczek said and I quote 

''  I understand that Gunpla is hard to come by for you, but I actually disagree entirely with this. In order to learn, and progress, you need to do more then you can. If you just "take what you can eat" you'll never get better or learn anything at all. In the event that you ruin a kit, so be it. You learned the lesson, and yes it sucks that you lost some money, but in the long run you'll understand what you did wrong and will learn to either prepare better, or avoid your mistake. '' ... 

This is true yes ... but at the same time, I have seen many junior modelers biting off more than they can chew and doing something they still cannot do and put into a bad community, that will have a negative impact on those said modelers. 

The most important thing is , instead of biting off more then you can chew and getting negative results and what not , I would just like to advise to take things slow and practice and slowly and surely, it will come to you. Just don't rush.