SAFS SPACE TYPE Prowler

My 3rd ever Ma.K kit and my first ever time building a Nitto kit - at the time this was the oldest model I had ever worked on! Talk about a learning experience, having mostly built Gunpla at this point, this was my first encounter with the idiosyncrasies of vintage kits and the joy of the SF3D Nitto kits in all their multimedia glory.

The kit including things like rubber parts, wire hoses, brass rod, and the camo card was quite a shock. Being a Nitto SAFS variant, the massive split seam down the middle of the suit was my first time having to fill an actual gap between parts with epoxy instead of just using basic putty to fill a small seam. This was also the first time I sculpted the joints on a Ma.K, and it was an interesting experience to learn how to make the folds in putty - several tries were needed to get a natural pose.

The biggest step this kit made me take was to learn how to approach lacquer hand painting. As a long time admirer of the Ma.K hand paint style and Kow's artwork, it was really important for me to keep this kit firmly in the traditional SF3D style - thus the classic warm white and orange scheme for this recon suit. A lot of research was done on the subject and in the dark ages of 2014, there were very few English language sources on lacquer hand painting - special thanks must be given to the blogs of Klav and Jsan9 who were indispensable with their advice and WIP images. Since this kit, I have almost exclusively hand painted my Ma.K kits and it has become a real passion of mine to experiment and learn more about the expressive hand paint technique associated with Ma.K

While I look back on this kit and a part of me wishes it looks better, as there are many amateurish mistakes I can see now (some of which I still make...), I have lots of fond memories of learning how to "do Ma.K in the Ma.K style" with this kit. As my first attempt at a 30+ year old kit, it sparked two of my biggest passions in modeling: vintage kits and expressionistic hand painting... so much so, that I would build its relative, the Nitto Fireball five years later!