So I'm going to revive this thread with my (ongoing) HGUC Sinanju project. This post is kinda stupidly picture heavy (and by that, I mean the pictures are pretty big, so I'll try to edit them down in a minute OKAY IT SHOULD BE FIXED NOW)
Let me say right away that this was a really fun kit. It's nice and complex, too. Several parts are on ball joints, polycaps like crazy...
Anyway, here it is fully assembled (if a bit hastily, as I didn't bother with a lot of sanding right away). Note that these pictures are a bit older, but right now its left leg is spread out over my desk and pieces are getting puttied, so that doesn't do me much good.
Alongside the aforementioned puttying, I'm doing a number of minor modifications. I separated the front and back skirt halves, shaved off some extra plastic, and am now carving out the tube...things. I never really knew what to call them, but whatever. This picture is still a little old, and I've worked a little more on the one. It's not going to look nearly as good as its MG counterpart, but I like it better than the untouched part.
Now onto the colors. You probably noticed the lack of gold accents. Bandai gave foil stickers for that, but I'm going to paint it and then hand paint the accents. I've still got to complete the modifications and puttying before I get to this, but I ran a spray test for the main red.
This is the basic candy coat process. Glossy black base coat, metallic over that, then the color on top. Normally people use Alclad II chrome for their metallic coat (and a black enamel under that), but I'm working entirely with Tamiya. The black and red are acrylics and the silver is actually synthetic lacquer from a spray can. I put some of it in a jar, let it degas, and then ran it through an airbrush. Tamiya's metallic acrylics are too flaky to look good.
This is my test run. I'm not sure where the texture came from (either I screwed up somewhere by spraying wrong/too little or that's just how it is, but I'll try it again later), but other than that the finish turned out really nice. The picture really has nothing on seeing it in real life, though.
Anyway, that's what I've got so far for Sinanju. Expect more in-progress pictures later.