Closing days of the Bloody Valentine War: NG Providence Ver. Hummingbird

Hello all. Much to everybody's surprises, the Hummingbird has another finished gunpla kit to show off. This is a kit that has take me 1 year in the making.

As you all know, I have been building so many AFVs and weathering a lot of them and I wanted to put the same skills I acquired from going back into my root modelling back into gunpla

I considered a lot of camo scheme but Pawel/Mr.Zinc suggest no camo so scratching my head, I decided to go for a grey based scheme much like the original one, albeit taking off the bright red parts and lighter blue ones. 

For the colours, I used Nato Black, Dark Grey, IJN Arsenal Grey(Kure shipyard), Royal Blue which are all Tamiya and for the little green parts, I used Mr. Hobby Aqueons H303. The metallic are painted in Vallejo Model Air Steel and Brass. 

I did not do any big modifications but I have done a lot of small ones. These include; extending the waist, extending the thighs, changing the gun, making a double jointed MG elbow, putting on the big side-thrusters on the outside of the shins and making the shoulder armour separate pieces ( I'm sure you are aware of how the HG and NG shoulders are made )

I did make a full build log for 3 parts but I stopped midway but anyway, you can still check out the 3 blog posts that I have done -
Part 1
Part 2 
Part 3 
These 3 parts are basically for all the mods I have done so I guess it's not too bad. 

The weathering is made to depict the Providence in the closing days and hours of the Bloody Valentine War when and where the heaviest of fighting happened with too much debris flying around and the high level of action demanded only necessary maintenance thus leaving the surface dirty and un-maintained.

The Chippings were done in two colours, an underlying chips of primer red colour which I sponged on using AMMO '' Chipping '' and on top of it I brushed on Vallejo Air '' Steel '' to show the bare metal chippings. The entire suit has been pin-washed rather than only panel-lined with a thin down Burnt Umber Oil colour. MIG production black smoke was applied to every gun opening on the funnels and all the vents on the suit. I finished all the weathering by applying some oil rendering using a various combinations of grey shade mixed with black and white oil paints to add some chromatic richness and some fading. 

Here's the all around view -

and here's some of the close up -

 

Per the norm from me, here's a number of poses -

 

I am my own harshest critique and there are some aspect of it that I could have done better. I did get rid of the seams on the guns but it wasn't enough. I can still see a little bit of seam on some places on the gun. Another one is that I may have over done the chipping. I wasn't happy about that but two friends with great skills, Marc/Decay and Chris/BigZ, said that the chippings were not overdone but only rather placed too evenly but assured me that they look presentable and the technique is sound. Who am I to argue with two great builders... but still, I am not entirely happy about it. I could have done a better job with the oil paint rendering but I was running on fumes by the time I got that stage so it didn't come out as obvious as I have hoped. I could have done it better. 

There may have been some mistake ( big or small ) that I made but still  this is a little bit better then how I usually paint Gunpla... LOL ( I suck at painting in gunpla). Even with the flaws, I am happy to see this came out like this.

My sincerest thanks to these people for the continued support on my gunpla works and pushing me to finish this -
Simon Curry, Darren Ling , Derick Siu , Pawel Zynk, Marc Mayer, Chriz Z, Fransiska, Thanos and Paul Bicar.