First I ended up in the shop that used to be called Risteysasema but nowadays it's something like mallikauppa.fi. Never been there but Tapsa recommended checking it, so... I asked for a good "ground material" for my asteroid and I ended up choosing some gray Woodland Scenics "ballast". Thanks for the recommendation! The bag says it's good for railroads and gravel roads so I bet it's good enough for an asteroid as well with those merits. He didn't have all I was looking for (but my todo list got longer again) so I had to set my course to Kamppi.
From Hobby Point I got - as I had half-expected - some Tamiya pigments and a container of Vallejo's burnt carbon (iirc). Oh and one button of white water paint, just in case I feel like going for a hasty winter camo again. It worked pretty nicely on Hobbes' surface.
Now that I got home, I mixed some water and white glue to make some nicely spreadable but not-that-quickly-setting goo. I spread that stuff over the foam base I had prepared last week. In the middle of the first sector I realized that I hadn't made a hole for the iron wire, so I punched a hole and didn't even make a mess! I'm getting better at this :P Just in case something was going to go wrong I spread the thin glue goo a sector at a time. When the first one was covered I just applied some of that ballast stuff quite liberally. Then shook all the excess crap off, GOTO 10.
That wasn't good for my shoulders, working in weird positions and all that. Or maybe I'm just broken. The end result was pretty neat so I decided that I'll let it dry well so that I don't blow all that ballast off when I start spraying it gray. As I had gotten in the "let's do this"-mood, I approximated a good lenght of wire I needed for the holder. My original idea was something shaped like a square bracket and a support leg going from the back of the plane.
I did some measuring, cut the wire and started bending it around. For a moment I thought I could take a shortcut (not bending the wire 180º but just going down) but it didn't feel too good in the terms of supporting the model. So I decided to go with my original idea because it sounded like it worked better. After each bend I checked if all was going as planned. Just to make sure. And just to be on the safe side I made a couple of extra bends under where the belly of the Imperial X-Wing would be, even though I didn't think it was absolutely necessary. Just in case.
That's how the fork ended up. I'll paint it matt black later so everybody gets that it's not a part of the picture:
Of course I had to check how the "final pose" would look and if it ends up like I had hoped:
At this point I can still finetune the whole thing and there's plenty of time and space for it. Maybe those caves need a bit of filling or maybe not. Who says that all asteroids are as smooth as potatoes, anyway?
I guess that's most of what's left: fixing the MDF-baseplate, painting the asteroid and attaching it to the baseplate with the model supporting metal wire. Oh yes, I've got a good feeling about this!
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