1/100 Master Grade Jegan Type-D

Mobile Suit: RGM-89D Jegan D
Release Date: April 2019
Series: Mobile Suit Gundam Unicorn

Start Date: May 23, 2026
Finish Date: July 16, 2026

I just love UC grunts, Sonic.

The Master Grade Jegan is a relatively modern kit, but the design dates way back to Char's Counterattack in 1988 - making it almost 40 years old at this point. In CCA the Jegan acts as the ultimate evolution of the GM, the mass production "good guy" suit from the original Mobile Suit Gundam. It's put in opposition to the Geara Doga, which has the same relationship to the "bad guy" Zaku II.

However, the folks in charge of Gundam really, really like the Jegan, so it shows up in a lot of other media. In addition to its initial appearance in CCA, it has variants that appear in Gundam F91, Unicorn, Narrative, and the Hathaway film adaptations - spanning 30 years in the UC timeline's chronology. And it's for good reason - the Jegan's design is awesome.

One of the most under-discussed aspects of the Jegan is that it feels like a true synthesis of the mobile suit technology that existed before it in-universe. Obviously the head and visor recall the GM, the primary inspiration point - and the shoulders are a re-proportioned take on the Nemo, a side evolution of the GM featured in Zeta. But the legs are shaped exactly like the Zaku's, only missing the signature Zaku piping. The skirt (or lack thereof) is another interesting choice - it gives the thighs a lot more visual real estate, and when viewed head-on, the borders between the crotch, thigh, and side skirts recall the outline of Zeonic skirting. Finally, the shield is also interesting - while not quite matching any prior suits, to me it looks a lot like the Zeta Gundam's shield. These underline the evolution of themes in U.C. - the thin border that separates entries where the Earth Federation is a flawed bulwark against worse factions, and the entries where the Earth Federation is the worse faction - and the lack of principles that guide weapon development in that world and ours.

This is the Type-D variant, which was a Katoki redesign featured in Unicorn - first as lineart for the light novel in 2006, then in the OVA series in 2010. It makes minor changes to the waist, shoulders, backpack, and head, but is otherwise identical to the original Jegan in appearance. I prefer this design, but all Jegans rate pretty highly for me. You can see how they compare below:

Since this is a very monochromatic color scheme, I plan on trying something new with the paint - shading. In previous painted builds, I simply applied a consistent coat of color to the model, and that was that. This time I'm going to try varying the shade to create more depth and visual interest. It's a common technique for airbrushers and I'm comfortable enough with my process to take a stab at it.

Post-Build Thoughts: Between this build and my previous two - the Ball ver. Ka and the Fat Cat 001 - it's been a really great year for pushing myself - I adore how this kit came out. But I will start with the self-critiques since I think that's still important to the process.

• My airbrush really struggled with shading. While it worked in the end with a lot of effort, I was getting pretty bad sputter when doing preshading. My airbrush is incredibly cheap, so this isn't surprising, but something I need to keep in mind for the future.
• Some elements of my shading were off. There are parts (the calves are the most obvious example) where my color is moderately different because I shaded the parts much more intensely with white and then had to put more colored paint over it during that step. Ultimately these things aren't super noticeable under good lighting conditions, but it's something I need to improve on in future kits.
• I need to slow down a bit on the decals - especially in regards to drying time. I photographed the kit in a way that didn't show this, but I did get some silvering on certain decals after my top coat - I just need to let those have a full 24-48 hours so that I can see them bone dry and make any corrections with Mark Fit.
• I'm happy with the colors I got, but they were not always the colors I intended. I need to be a little more precise with my color mixing process in the future. Some of that will just come with experience, though.

...But for the positives, I think I really got some great shading here. This was a big experiment for me, and I wasn't sure if I was going to like it in the end - clean builds have always made more intuitive sense to me. But seeing the shading in person and not just behind the screen, I feel like I understand the effect that people aim for with this technique, and I'm really excited to bring it to future builds.

Also, what a kit. Nigh perfect - I wish the beam rifle was a few more pieces so it didn't have the huge seam, but otherwise really well-built. Great job to Bandai!

Color Guide:
Since this was a shaded kit, there are some highlight colors that I wasn't precise on - so take these as just the base color that I did after preshading and before highlighting in some cases.

• Light Green: 75% Tamiya LP-2 White, 25% Tamiya LP-31 Dark Green 2 IJN
• Dark Green: Really rough mix. About 40% Light Green above, 40% Dark Gray below, 20% Tamiya LP-31 Dark Green 2 IJN
• Dark Gray: Really rough mix. Mainly Tamiya LP-27 German Gray, Mr. Color GX2 Black, Mr. Color UG14 MS Light Blue, very small amount of Mr. Color UG08 MS Purple
• Frame: Gaia Surfacer Evo GS-10 Gun Metal
• Red: 66% Mr. Color UG14 MS Sazabi Red, 17% Tamiya LP-2 White, 17% Tamiya LP-8 Pure Yellow
• Yellow: 66% Tamiya LP-8 Pure Yellow, 33% Tamiya LP-2 White

Gallery

Progress Update 1: Snap Building

I was surprised by the size of the box - this is the same size as the ν Gundam ver. Ka, just a little shallower, even though this is a grunt suit. I guess CCA-era suits are just built big.

I'd never seen Unicorn, so I wanted to build and watch at the same time - hence building it on the coffee table - but I could not split focus at all and just ended up watching and building separately.

The first evening's progress. This isn't a particularly in-depth build (which I really welcomed after the crazy part interations on the Fat Cat 001) so I could've powered through, but breaking it up still feels nice.

Inner frame and weapons complete. This kit has no frills as far as gimmicks, but it's still very posable here - all the joints are doubles, and the hip can separately swivel both hip sockets, which not all kits are capable of. You can tell that it wasn't quite designed to be built as a standalone inner frame - a lot of joints require the armor to hold them in place (see the seam running down the crotch) - but it looks nice anyway.

The only part that I think is bad on this build is the rifle. They do try to hide the seamline with a separate handle piece, but it's still a pretty bad join. I'll probably have to use putty since the pieces aren't really meeting that well in all places. But, I'll accept that for minimal processing on the other pieces.

Half-complete armoring up. Another pleasantly smooth build process here, with nice large panels and great fitment.

And the armor is complete. Super fun build and very relaxing coming off such a complex previous kit.

There are a couple of areas I'd like to address in the parts sorting. They did cut a few corners on certain pieces - the left waist piece has a nice frame-colored back panel, but the right waist piece doesn't. Additionally, the yellow bits at the tips of the feet show through the top. This is pretty easy to fix in both cases though, and may just need to be masked and painted separately.

Progress Update 2: Surface Prep

Normally, I do surface prep in a kind of rolling fashion, where I prep as I put parts onto clips for painting. But this time, I was waiting on a big order of paints and primers that I wanted to use, so I took a Saturday when the whole family was sick and worked through all of my parts at once on the kitchen table. This took a long time but was mostly just absentminded work that was kind of therapeutic and enjoyable.

Only a few parts needed real fixing. The rifle seam didn't quite close with Tamiya extra thin cement, so I went back and added some Mr. Putty R to the seam. This putty flows a bit out of the tube, but you can also add lacquer thinner to water it down even more, allowing it to easily fill small gaps like this.

The chest vents are separate pieces from the chest itself, even though in the anime there's no seam around this part. I think they did this to more easily support other Jegan variants with different chest vents, like the Stark Jegan and the never-released ECOAS Type. I think the panel line here kind of messes with the flow of the chest, and I accidentally gouged it a bit when trimming the parts of the runner - so I decided to use putty to make this a continuous panel as well. I used masking tape to keep putty off of the inside seam there - it's a lot harder to clean that up than the outside seams.

After sanding, these look good, but I fully expect to do some more putty/sanding operations after priming and really inspecting the parts.

One problem I realized during the snap build was that these vernier thrusters were not disassemblable. The yellow interior piece fits into the gray exterior, but there's no way to push them apart afterwards since the back is totally enclosed. Luckily, I did realize this early on, and only assembled 2 of the 5 before deciding to keep the other 3 separated.

So what I did was I took a very small drill bit and put a hole through the back of the verniers, going until I started getting yellow plastic shavings. This created a hole where I could then use a thin skewer to pop the yellow part off. Since the hole is on the back, this should be invisible in the finished model.

And parts preparation was complete. I organized these by color and now they're actually ready for paint.

Progress Update 3: Painting, Part 1

This kit is really heavily dominated by frame/gray parts and green parts, so I decided to start with the little part batches. I thought that if I messed up any shading, I'd be able to repair and redo these without as much effort - but I really didn't end up needing to do any of that.

For the outside of the thruster bells, I used the stainless steel Alclad II that I had leftover from the Fat Cat 001. But I heard from others that you could buff it to get a different finish - so I tried that and I think I just rubbed most of it off. In a way though, I ended up really liking the look - it's almost an inverse panel line where the shine stayed more prominent on the recesses of the bell - it was a nice happy accident.

And then I couldn't put it off any longer - I had to take the leap and start shading.

For the few red parts, I primed in pink, but then sprayed a base layer in a brick-red color I used red and gray paint to achieve. Then I preshaded with white, hit a base coat with red, and added a small amount of post-shading by mixing a little white and yellow into the airbrush cup. The post shading is hardly noticeable here, but I really liked how it turned out overall. I prepared a more detailed visual for the yellows:

These turned out very differently than I intended. I was adapting the Saint-ism technique for painting yellows, where he bases with a very vibrant orange - but I based with a very pure red color instead, thinking it would mix to form something more orangey. It didn't really work like that at all - the white preshaded areas ended up very pale, while the red areas ended up with an almost peach-like color. Still, similar to the outside of the bells, I considered this a happy accident and ended up really liking it. The Jegan has kind of a pale yellow anyway and I feel that this was an interesting interpretation of that color.

And here's all of these painted and with some small assembly steps.

Next I moved onto the inner frame. In my recent quest to find the perfect inner frame technique, I opted for a new paint this time - Gaia Surfacer Evo GS-10 Gun Metal. I've used Gaia surfacers for all of my kits since getting the airbrush, so I knew I liked their handling characteristics - and having a metallic option seemed like it would be a nice way to reduce the number of steps for frame painting.

This kit doesn't differentiate between grays - the frame and gray pieces on the rifle, shield, etc. are all molded in the same color. However, I wanted to add a little bit of color separation, so you won't see every part in this photo.

I ended up liking this a lot. It's quite a bit lighter than other "gunmetal" paints I've worked with, but I don't mind it for this color scheme. I wonder if I could mix it with black lacquer paint to get darker finishes on other projects.

Of course, the rifle needed a bit more filling - but that's pretty normal, you can't tell if there are any hairline gaps until you even out the colors.

Progress Update 4: Painting, Part 2

I took a pretty long break here - I had a couple of weeks of work travel, vacationing, other things going on... so my parts were masked a ready for a long time before I actually got around to them.

On some parts, like the beam rifle, I tried using liquid mask since the shapes were so weird and tiny. While ultimately it worked out here, it did remove some of the metallic flakes from the primer I used - so I had to do a lot of touch ups that I didn't like afterwards. Still, I thought this came out really well when I did the grays.

Speaking of these, I did a mix between black, german gray, blue, and even a slight amount of purple to get the gray color where I wanted it. These were postshaded as well, since I wanted them to be a little more washed out than they were on first application.

Here's all of the light green parts primed and pre-shaded. While I could have done all of the steps in one session, I split it over three nights just to make it easier to digest.

Did some test assembly with the shield to make sure that the colors worked and that I didn't want to do any postshading with the green. I felt like this all worked pretty well together, so went on to finish the whole batch.

I put together all of the pieces that didn't need the few dark green bits - this was a big motivation moment for me and I knew I was gonna push the rest of the way fairly quickly when I snapped these together. It all just looked right.

And final snap together once those darker parts were done. These photos make it look slightly bluer than it is in reality, but I'll try to capture the colors better in the final photoshoot.

I can definitely be critical of a few things here - the dark "green" was a YOLO mix of a ton of different stuff and I could have definitely spent a little more time on the mix, certain parts finishes aren't perfect, certain preshades should have been a little different in their feathering - but to be honest, looking at this in person just gave me such a huge "I get it" moment regarding preshading. Way more than on any other model I've built, I feel like this has a depth and presence that I just love. Really excited to keep improving on these methods.

Progress Update 5: Miscellaneous Wrap-Up

Gonna be a short one - I painted the pilot figure here, even though I had no plans to use it as part of the display. I figured I'd get a little practice on technique for any future diorama work.

Just like I did for the Ball ver. Ka, I started with zenithal highlights on the pilot figure (lighting from the front), then coated with a pale yellow mix. I did detail work with Testor's enamels and Turbo Dork metallic for the visor, then top-coated and washed with Tamiya Dark Gray. The top coat was quite bad - I used a spray can to avoid doing any airbrush setup and cleanup - and the coat was quite uneven. But after the wash it just kinda looked "weathered" so I rolled with it.

I also wasn't too picky because the pilot got Cask of Amontillado'd immediately. Even before shutting the hatch I had to laugh since half of the figure is completely hidden by the chest frame - there's not even a way to remove it without completely disassembling the torso.

Panel lining and decal work was uneventful - so here's the last photo of the parts before the final topcoat.

Some last thoughts on the decals - one of the nice things about P-Bandai releases as opposed to normal kits is that they come with included waterslide decals - for other kits, I've had to purchase these separately from third-party manufacturers. However, I've also heard a lot of horror stories about Bandai waterslides and how horrible they are. I was considering buying some third-party ones to avoid these, but never did - and I'm glad I didn't. These weren't nearly as bad as I was led to believe, and with some patience and Mark Fit I think I got totally good decal finishes here. This huge Nahel Argama decal right on the curved thigh surface was definitely the most stressful one to apply, but I was really proud of it in the end. Bandai also included white and gray variants of a lot of the decals, which was nice since the gray was really similar in tone to my paints and wasn't showing up well. I was also really happy with the contrast between the red and the green kit paint - it really pops on these decals.