>>10938665Here is my RG RX-78-2 that I built last year, using hobby knife (no glass file), sticker sheet and a rattle can of flat top coat on top of bare plastic. You can see some of the transparent stickers still stick out under the top coat really obviously, I did it to protect the stickers (on my previous non-coated kits the stickers eventually lost adhesion and just peeled off), but ultimately I treated it as a warm-up kit for getting back into the swing of things since I hadn't built a proper Gunpla in about 12 years prior to that.
My approach for the kit was to assume I would never expose the inner frame (which is actually very skeletonized compared to what the 2.0 will do), and spray each limb as I complete it. Hold the limb straight, spray, wait for it to dry, then bend the joints to expose surfaces hidden by armor pieces and spray those areas for complete coverage. For the parts with shiny stickers (eyes, cameras) you might want to spray the pieces individually and then put the stickers on, but the transparent stickers you could get away with putting underneath the top coat even if it does end up looking ugly (everyone starts somewhere, your first kit isn't going to be perfect no matter what you do).
You shouldn't sand every single surface on a Gunpla, the main important thing is to sand/file the nub areas so that you don't get exposed nubs sticking out. Do that to each piece prior to assembly. As you can see from the image, even flat top coat on top of bare plastic makes it look a lot nicer since it doesn't have the plastic sheen look anymore.
