A new beginning - again

I've been neglecting painting and other methods of modeling because the holiday trip and hunting for the flights has eaten plenty of time. All that results in a somewhat slow and easy start for my newest project.

That project is, as planned before, Trumpeter's 1/35 20mm FlaK38 AA-gun. I've only built one Trumpeter model before, a Nebelwerfer 42, which was awesome and one of the best models I've ever built and painted, in my own opinion. Completely unlike Italeri's awful 15cm Panzerwerfer 42 auf Schwerer Wehrmachtsschlepper... Maybe I'll get some pics of those posted at some point in the future.



But to the point. This is the box before the official openage:

 

And the contents of the kit:

There are a bunch of sprues and it looks like the sprues are pretty sensibly arranged, with three sets of photoetched parts. Who knows what's going to happen with those for I've never done much with pe-parts to begin with.

I had started with cutting off a couple of "start with these"-pieces, such as the four gun barrels the two pieces where they get connected to. Today I marched to the cold and dark balcony and sprayed the basecoat on the sprues and the pe-sets. A couple of them consisted of pieces that let me spray the other side, too. Less of a hassle the next time. Of course I'll need to fix the basecoat of the pieces because all of them are connected to the sprues, I just wanted to get the most of that done as quickly and effortlessly as possible. Yeah, I was feeling lazy. Besides, painting all those individually is painfully bothersome.

After that I went and painted the end parts of the gun barrels with black-gray. The barrels I had filed clean earlier this week, so there were no injector marks or anything to ruin the experience. The reason why I decided to paint these parts at this point, is that if I don't, they'd be impossible to make good-looking later on when they're glued to the structure. Not that I expect to get them perfect this way, either, but at least I've eliminated one source of problems early on.

That's it for this post, maybe this project gets some speed now that I have got it started for real. Could be that I won't be able to paint much on the weekdays because it's getting so dark so early and I'd have to do all that on the weekend. Not going to paint inside in this apartment and the balcony is difficult to get nicely lit. Anyway, I intend to do most of the painting with the airbrush because I got a new can of air and I also have to learn to use that damn thing. And I sure as hell won't learn anything if I don't do anything :P