Yup he did it again! SD Gundam has a TCG!

Saturdays my hubby works out of a different Costco than his usual store. Well when he was at his lunch he went out and wandered over to the local TRU and guess what he found?  Yup that is right, a SD Gundam trading card game.

Now most of you out there have heard of things like Pokemon, Magic and some of the other more famous trading card games.  You get characters and you battle, generally one on one to see who will win. This game he found is based on one of the earlier SD Gundam shows.

There are commons, uncommons and of course rare foil and gold cards. We haven't played it yet but it looks like a lot of fun for sure.

We currently have just booster sets but we are waiting for the started decks that he ordered. Usually I don't play these games much anymore.  See my hubby is a wizard at these games.  You can beat him a couple of times but usually by the fifth game he is trouncing you so often that it just isn't worth playing anymore.  But well I really do want to make him happy and these cards are fun, so I am looking forward to it.

Here are some of the cards...the rare ones that is!

Look what I got for my anniversary?

Yup I have been happily married now for four years.  My sweet hubby decided when he was in Toronto for business to pick me up a new little kit to put together.  If you had told me four years ago that I would actually be happy to receive a gundam to put together i would have given you the old stink eye but these guys are actually kinda fun to put together.

Now this little kit was on the easy side for me.  As you can imagine after building these for the past year with the hubby I am getting better at them.  I didn't need any help putting it together and managed to do it in about an hour(ish). This was one of the simpler kits I have done and I actually didn't mind that at all.  As you can see by the photos, he is a zaku style SD in green with some fun pop on armor...and I do mean pop on.He was very simple to put together with a minimum of stickers and joints.  Mostly a pop me together little guy.

Not the best pics I have taken but well you can see that he is a little guy.  That is the salt shaker from my dinning room table next to him.  He is just about four inches tall and he has this huge battle axe that makes him almost tip over when you put it into his hand.  Simple, silly but sweet, IMO.  I enjoyed taking a break from being a mom and baker to make him.  Hopefully next week I will finally sit down and work on the 1/144 models that Fox set aside for me.  One of them is so old that we have to actually use glue with it.  And that is why it isn't done yet.  That glue gives me a headache pretty quick.

So enjoy my little friend here and hopefully soon i will have some more...and of course someday soon I will do a little action battle type photo series of my little guys playing.

My newest tiny friend...or oh wow an SD SD

As you all know yesterday was Mother's Day here in North America (Cananda and the US for sure). I had a great day, receiving a home made dragon pendant from the hubby and a funky heart shaped nut from my youngest, a call from my oldest..and I think a text from the middle child.

Since the hubby was home and I had a kit I had yet to build I thought it was time to do something with the hubby.  And of course we had to take pictures of this little guy.  Now the kit is one of the older ones out there.  Now I don't read Japanese and yes this is a kit from Japan but I looked at the number.  This kit's number is 158...seems like a high number to those not in the know but for those of us getting an idea it means this kit is quite old in fact.  Well for a gundam kit.  Released in 2010 and selling for around $3.50 it was a cheap yet fun kit.  This is a simple build really.  The arms are only two parts and most of the colors are done by stickers but it was something for the hubby and I to do together.

What was truly fun about this kit is that when you remove all the fancy armour you can slid him into one of our other kits, making that other kit a mecha suit for a gundam!  As you will see from the photos I am attaching.

Lets start out with completed images of this little guy

As you can see he is rather colorful with all those foily stickers. The top picture is him inside his big boy armor...okay that is how I saw it.  You see he is compensating for being small by adding on platform feet and big wings.

What he actually is is this little figure

 Tiny dont you think?  He wants to play with the big boys so he puts on his armor

He even steals the wings off of other figures, showing just how flexible he is but mostly he decides that he needs to be able to take on the big guys!  That would be the 1/100 gundam guys

So as you can see these are fun little guys and most of my SD gundams can trade pieces between each other. Makes for some playtime fun and hopefully I will get a working camera and go nuts with little dioramas

Crystal and Gold lead to some interesting little guys

Well yesterday the hubby and I decided to build the dual set we picked up.  Inside were your normal sized gundams but the best part was that one was all gold metal and the other was clear plastic parts in various colors.

They took barely anytime for use to put them together.  The hubby beat me by a few minutes but then he has been building longer than I have.  Here are what they look like.

As you can see the top images are of the crystal one I built.  I had a funky light that doesn't quite make it past his chest but it changes colors making my little guy look really cool!

The bottom image is of my new metal guy.  Not as good a pic as it could have been but some days I just can't seem to take good photos

And they looks so cool on horses that I just had to post this one (again) I am looking into getting a few more horses.  Found one that is a Pegasus!  That would be way cool right?

Some times SDs are bigger than the normal

What does that mean you ask?  Well for those of you who know me, you know I have started following my hubby's hobby of building gundam models.  I do the SD or super deformed mostly.  Why?  Because they are cuter than all get out.  They are colorful and have silly weapons and are simpler (some are but not all) to build.  They average only a few inches in height and are just plain fun to build and take photos of.

Well yesterday I got a new one that we expected to be a bit bigger than the normal SD.  The last one I did that was larger was the size of the 1/144 models and was more complicated than the usual SD models.  Well I was a bit off on the estimate of size.  This little creature was far from little.  In his completed large size he was the size of my hubby's 1/100 models!

To give you an idea the partial image to the right of the top pick is a 1/144 Zaku.  He is just a huge model.  Took me longer than I expected and my dearest hubby helped me in the end with the stickers and putting the sections together properly.

The cool thing about this model is that it converts.  You can bring it down to its SD base size (which is a huge blocky thing, we call him Mr Blocky) or you can convert it to a base that allows you to put other SDs on display on it.  Personally of course I like him this way and plan on keeping him big.  

It is hard to see in these photos but the wings in the back have the image of pheonixes in flame.  All in all this was a difficult but fun bit of building for me.  I am still a rookie when it comes to kits but I built it (mostly by myself) in one day.

My next kit will be a dual set that includes a shiny metal SD and a crystal SD...yeah crystal...still plastic but the pieces are see through and will sparkle when lit up.  We plan on displaying it using a lighted stand.  Should be fun.

Getting interested in your spouse's hobby can be fun

Anyone who knows me knows that my hubby is a builder.  I don't mean actual buildings but models.  His favorite to build are of course gundams. Now if you don't know what they are I can show you easy enough.  They are robots from a japanese animation series.  This is one of the long running ones.  According to my hubby it has been out over 30 years!

As a fan of the show he of course knows every season and series of model.  Me, I find the anime a wee bit tiresome and well filled with old cliches but I admit the models are cool.

Now being a good wifey (yes no laughing here I am a good one!!) I said I would like to learn how to do the models.  The fancy HUGE ones he had are way too hard for a beginner but this little series of SD or super deformed ones seemed easy enough.  And to be honest there is a series of 12 minutes episodes that go with them and the story while a wee bit over the top is fun, funny and beautiful at the same time.

Now back to the models.  The first one he had me put together was of a horse.  Yes a horse,  If you know me you know I adore the image of horses.  The strength, the look as they run and their liquid soft eyes.  My first book that I owed as my very own was Black Beauty, so starting me with a horse made sense.

Another reason it did was well it was an easy kit.  This was considered a level two kit.  Simple and easy to put together so i did it.

As you can see he is a robot horse.  Now this was only partially done.  We decided to remove the stickers on his hooves and eyes and actually paint him.  He now is chrome and is really cool!

The second kit was a tad more difficult.  Still done in the SD size he had a lot more parts.  I can't remember his real name but I call him Mister Sticky stabby.  You can see why here:

Yes he has a ton of weapons.  What I hadn't realized when we got this kit is that he is a convertible kit.  Yes like the transformers that my hubby has this is a robot with a disguise...okay just another bigger form

Once I finished this one well I just had to do another one.  My third kit is Ryubi and he is still an SD gundam but he is a mega sized kit.  Now that confused me quite a bit but when I opened the box it made sense.  He is bigger than mr stabby but he is still that fun shape as you can see

We had to use the big stand for him but he was so cool and he has more accessories than Paris Hilton!

Now we have plans to black wash this.  Black washing or panel lining is a technique that helps bring out all the molded details on these plastic kits.  It was a lot easier than  I expected and I plan on doing him up this weekend.  After that we or more I will be using the hubby's airbrush (eekk) and putting a clear coat finish on the model.  See the foily stickers will peel up if not coated down.  A new thing for me to learn.

I had so much fun with these that I now have a bunch more to build.  Now the artwork on these boxes is quite good.  As you can see from these photos.

 These kits go from extremely simple (the first one) to really complex (the second kit) So I will be having fun and playing with these guys over the next few weeks.  I will post up more images as i work on my little friends.  And cooler still is that my hubby is planning on building me a shelf for my little guys and they come with enough friends that I can use my daughters legos, build castles and then make fun scenes with my dragons.  Tomorrow I think i will post up images of my megablocks dragons.  They are silly too but fun!