Final stages approatcheth, supposedly

At last this thing is getting to the finishing stages.

Or at least until I notice some sort of a gigantic mistake and have to go and fix it. But that's how it goes, onwards with a ton of foul words. The theme for this sprint is: trying something new (to me) yet again.

To me the FlaK looked a bit too clean and nice, the basic Dunkelgelb felt like it was eating details. I was pondering on the correct term and googled around for nothing useful. Obviously I came up with the word on my way to work: filtering. That wasn't what I meant in the end, but at least I got to read about something new.
So I dug up my ancient jar of GW Black Ink (I still can't understand why "Wash" wasn't good enough for them...), but over the years it had gone a bit thick. So I thinned it down quite a bit and tested on the bottom of the gun. Goody goody, I painted (or washed) the rest of the model with that. As far as I've understood, the point is to get the thin liquid into the recesses and notches of the model so they get articulated a bit. At the same time the dark paint dims the original bright colour and at least in this case gave the model a bit of a "this thing has spent a while in the rain". Which is exactly what I wanted to achieve.

Of course I had forgotten that the gun looks a bit better if it has all the elemental pieces in it. I cut the ammo cartridges off the sprue, painted and later put them into their places. In the photo they're just cleaned and tried if they even fit there:

After making a bit of a mess and letting the glue dry I attempted to put the shield halves in their own slots. Of course they didn't fit nicely so I had to thin the connectors a bit, let's see if I end up pinning one or both of them.
Sometimes this model is really flimsy and the structure worries me a lot, sometimes it's just really good. It's a weird kit all in all, but I'll rant about the general feeling when it's time.

Tapeage, dammit!

So I began my latest attempt at painting camouflage. First I sliced stripes of masking tape to make a bunch of narrow ones, which I then put on the model at nice intervals:

Next I masked every other "slot" to avoid excess amount of paint going to places it wasn't supposed to go to. The remaining uncovered areas I sprayed with my trusty green.

After drying over a night I ripped off the tape pieces I had previously put there (it looked quite interesting at that point already) and masked the parts I had painted green. One of the fenders had some paint torn off with the tape:

So after another night I removed the rest of the tape and observed what I had done. The result looks fun in a way, the effect is intriguing. It's just a shame that the left fender had a large-ish area of paint torn off and I have no clue how I managed to fail so badly with the tape. Especially as that's the only place where it took 2+ layers of paint with it...

Despite a tiny setback like this my approach worked surprisingly well. Maybe I should reconsider those colours, because it looks more like a bamboo-forest than something that'd work in a central Europe. But then again, maybe it'd work even in that forest behind this building... I'll have to try to weather it a bit as well so maybe that'll tone it down a bit.

The real end result will be seen when the whole set is finally assembled instead of being spread around different tables. But that'll take a couple more days. Or a couple dozen. We'll see.

My TODO list is growing

Last Friday I got happy when HLJ informed me that they've sent my order already.

Today I got even happier when a FedEx dude called in the mid-morning and asked when he can deliver my "packet from Japan". They ended up bringing that thing to my workplace so I (and they) didn't have to wait until the evening, which was nice :) My coworkers at least had fun with my reaction.

That box was nicely light and not too big to carry around. Unlike the other item of the day, but more about that in a while.

Confusingly the boxes of the models weren't of the same size, but then again, the machines aren't equally sized so I guess it's not that weird after all. I've just grown used to the "normal" model boxes that are more or less standardized or something.
The names that are printed on the boxes are to be ignored, for they're going to be handled as forbidden "Unseen" 'Mechs of the BattleTech universe. That cool looking thing on the left is one of my all-time favourites: a Marauder IIC and the one on the right is a Warhammer IIC. In this case letter C tells everyone that it's a Clan variant. Any of those toys of the freebirth scum aren't supported. Unless we're talking about miniatures for tabletop gaming, of course, because that's not as strict as collecting. Playable buttons can be whatever is needed or felt like - these things just aren't for playing.

These seem to be made of very few pieces, but these aren't any highly detailed Panzers anyway. We'll see if I manage to finish one or both of them for Model Expo 2011. One can always hope.

I got something done for the current project, as shocking as it might be. Earlier I complained that excluding the wheel hubs the camo pattern I tried to paint ended up looking more like fruit turron than a weapon. So more painting was to be done. Yesterday I remembered that I had seen an interesting pattern in one of my modeling-related RSS-feeds but coulndn't find the pic I was looking for. This one has that same pattern implemented but the photo itself is somewhat darker and less clear than in the one I originally found. Just before writing this post I painted over my fuckups with Dunkelgelb and will continue tomorrow with some masking and painting. Luckily I hadn't wasted a horrible amount of time with that so far.


Oh, the 10kg packet I mentioned earlier. I finally received the packet I sent to myself over two weeks ago: the Complete Calvin and Hobbes Collection. Damn, it took ages to travel these 2670 kms... and it was slightly damaged as well. I don't think I want to know what all these logistics-people do to luggage and postal packets because they're always (or way too often) completely mashed. Oh well, in the end all that matters is that my precious is where it belongs. Here:

In addition to all that the wise guys (three wise kings, or Reyes Magos as the story I was told says) brought me Fallout New Vegas, it also eats my free time. Between all the other weird things I do it's just nice to go to the Nevada desert and beat several - more or less innocent - bystanders to pulp with a Sledgehammer 8) The previous Fallout ate something like 103 hours of gaming time on the first round, this one has taken almost 10 after the first couple of sessions. And I'm just in the beginning... There are many more interesting games coming along the year for both systems we have around here, both with completely different kind of material.

At least I'm not going to run out of stuff to do. In a good way.

New year, more stuff to do

The year has changed and I ran out of holidays.
Our suitcases finally got here this night with their valuable contents. Only 3 days late. Once again.

The spanish santa brought a couple of new models to work on: the first one is Revell's easykit X-Wing that doesn't officially require paints or glue. We'll see how that turns out, I expect some extra work anyway. Oh, and I haven't built a single terrorist model at all, for I've always stayed on the better side of the Empire. I guess santa didn't know and I don't mind :)

The second one is a Tamiya SdKfz 251/1 with a couple of dudes. For them I had to buy a bit more paint so I can do the skin. My ancient Citadel skintone paints have gone dry ages ago so I went with more Vallejo products. I also trust that the Tamiya halftrack is a lot nicer to build than the Panzerwerfer by Trumpeter or Italeri, years ago. That was awful.

I also made an order to Hobby Link Japan, one that I've been pondering about for more than a year. The ptb of BattleTech went and copied some Macross-designs to their game and these things are the original Marauder and Warhammer in scale 1:100. They'll end up on the end of my FiFo todo-list, whenever they arrive.

My OmniMech miniatures should also be finished, they've only been more or less wip for almost two years now. I'm somewhat ashamed of that. My new dremel pieces are also begging to be used. I'll get there eventually...

At least I'm not going to run out of stuff to do :)