A prime example

Finally all the pieces were set up well enough for me that I felt it was high time to proceed to the painting station. Before anything else I masked the still open cockpit shut and then covered the whole piece with Vallejo's gray primer. In these photos the model's on my hands so I could show the size/scale to a coworker of mine. And why take practically the same pics twice?

Cerulean blue

My model has no official, real-life counterpart, so the whole paint scheme was going to crawl out of my sick mind. Instead of painting the underbelly of my MiG boringly light (gray), I wanted something different. Therefore I mixed up a batch of Vallejo's Magical Blue mixed with white and gray trusting my gut feeling for the amounts, then I thinned it down some with the same manufacturer's thinner and let go. I do feel it ended up quite neat.

Camo pattern

The other side is going to get something else completely. I believe I'll skip the boring grays again and go for a more down to earth colour scheme. Perhaps it'll end up being tank red and green or even the legendary Dunkelgelb. Everything is still open to discussion, at least until I start paging through my Model Air containers.

A milestone of sorts

A few years of muttering by myself

Oh my... This blog of mine turns three right about now. Of course the time I've used (and will keep using) completely irrelevant, I just happened to notice the event a few days ago. That's why I'm commenting on this occasion in my usual weird way. I guess I should warn already that there may be some ramblign ahead, even more than usually.

The insufferable difficulty of prediction

When I started the whole blog, I said something like this: "Sometimes I get a fuckton of stuff done in a rapid pace and sometimes a fifteen minute task ends up being delayed for six monhts. Based on that, I assume that my posting will follow a similar pattern". Apparently I was partially correct: my projects still advance at an unsteady pace, but the text I've managed to keep churning out at a steady pace and maybe even at a consistent, if low quality.

[ORIGINAL IMAGE MISSING AFTER n+1 YEARS]

As I was preparing myself and my improbable readers (I really didn't expect anyone to actually read anything) for a more or less slow fading away of the blog. In my first post, no less! "Of course you can try to guess if I manage to make more than ten posts". I guess I was keeping true to the "you can't always win, but you can, however, always lose"-approach. At least I wasn't loading too much pressure or expectations that most likely would've killed my excitement at blogging.

The style

My writing style or the lack of it hasn't changed much over the years, I believe. Either it means that I'm already perfect or as retarded as before. Of course it's possible that I've managed to improve on myself over time, but I feel that the text is and has been like myself from the beginning. I'm afraid that I keep overusing the same words and phrases from post to post and title to title and I work to avoid it. I just can't go and crosscheck all the existing content before I hit the publish-button.

The theme

The Blogspot style or layout hasn't really changed at all. Pretty early on I realized that I could actually use the html-headers and mostly I've done so to avoid the problem of a mountain of unformatted plaintext. The theme has been this way and I thought of customizing it a bit, at least to make a proper title image. Being totally incapable of drawing anything by hand or 'puter I just haven't got to it really. Once I tried an idea of merging a blueprint-style picture with a photo of a model of mine, but that didn't go far as my attempt at vectorizing a pic from the Sturmpanzer's instructions got ruined somehow. Maybe I'll get to restart and actually even finish that kind of a project one of these days.
Something like this is what I envisioned, somehow. At least I liked the idea.

"Content"

Avoiding insane walls of text has at least been one of my goals. As well as using at least one pic per post, as Jussi Linkola's reference once said somewheere - if I remember correctly. Even if I haven't had a perfectly fitting image to offer. I haven't always been able to do that for a reason or another, but hey, that's life again.

Scale models

Most of the projects I've documented have, of course, been related to scale models. That's what this heap of weirdness started from: I started writing down my thoughts with "work in progress" photos in here so I maybe wouldn't bother my family members and coworkers with crap they couldn't care less about. Based on the taglist I've apparently completed nine models in three years. It could've been way worse and hey, I've done other things, too.

 

[ Sturmpanzer | FlaK | T-65C | SdkFz | MAD | WHM | Königstiger | Jagdpanther | M-10 ]

Miniatures

Remembering old models aside, in the last five years I've accomplished shamefully little in the miniature front. Besides the BattleTech introbox I haven't had the time to touch my 'Mechs. Many a year ago I ordered a Star of OmniMechs, some 30 Elementals and ended up with a missent BattleMech for my Warrior's targeting practises. The Hellbringer and Summoner variants I had started, at least one of them had the feet dremeled open for better posing and I guess I had basecoated something. I think.

An intro-Omni

Attacking these long-forgotten and long-ignored metal miniatures is the next thing I'll go for. My newest two tank models can wait for a while, I believe. I really can't comprehend how my 'Mech processes ended up starving but I can always claim that my Scheduler was in the interruptible mode... cough.

Games

There hasn't been much about games here, earlier more than lately, I think. With my way of gaming there's absolutely no way I could keep a gaming blog up and alive, but that hasn't been the point, anyway. Playing through a game is a project among others. Most likely I'll keep this sort of posts on the sidelines, as a rarity, like before, depending on what I play and when. Of course that applies to everything else in my hobby blog: depends on how I feel at any given moment.

Other, please specify?

Clearly the most different of my projects is the super-awesome spacegame prototype, or whatever the hell you want to call it. At the same time it's the most irregularly worked on and even more irregularly reported about.

As I've said before, making a game has been an idea for who knows how long and I work on this beast more or less randomly. Sometimes I work a bit on a bunch of consecutive days, sometimes for long runs at a time (especially if there's an interesting problem or just plenty of progress), sometimes I don't even remember its existence for months. I trust I end up writing something about it soonish, depending on how that QuadTree implementation of mine progresses and becomes useful. Maybe.

A lie, a bigger lie, ...

According to the Blogger's stats ProjectMumblings has been red about 5k times, it has 173 posts (10 comments) and one official follower. It's absolutely shocking! Mostly I'm wondering where the hell did all these pageviews come from to a silly blog that I've never advertised or even mentioned much anywhere...

There you see, generally there's an upgoing red trend (from the beginning) but lately it's diving pretty steeply, as the blue line shows. Where does that traffic come from, anyway? I haven't the foggiest, except that some visits are from different image searches, as the Traffic Sources list claims. Strangeness.

Hangings aka Pylons II

Picturelessness

As the entertainment factor of "filing just a bit more there" and other methods of playing time approached zero without any limits, I raised my poor hands and glued my custom-made pylons on the wings. As everyone and their neighbours already know, I'm far from being a perfectionist and again we see it: It's "good enough for me", especially as I've never seen an example in the nature. Besides, what does a tracked retard like me know about these magnificent flying machines? ;)
To make the whole plane look a bit more uniform I brushed these new pieces with Vallejo's gray primer. Had I left them white and stained with marker lines, they'd haunted me day and night, so maybe this gives me some sort of peace of mind. Next up: priming the whole plane, in a couple of runs.

Wiring

I've kept working on the pylons I advertised - and kept in the dark - the last time. Mostly I've filed off excess waves and tried to achieve some sort of proper shape to them. Still, I don't dare to display them, maybe later when I've attached them to the wings and they've been at least basecoated. Or, more likely, when the ground attack equipment is also attached...

Wired madness

While googling for a variety of reference pictures I stumbled upon a photo of the front landing gear and a couple of cables snaking around the bottom. I guess they're some sort of brake lines or something, the hell if I know, but the main thing is that it seemed like a quick and simple detail. So I cut out a couple of short pieces of tiny metal wire (I've been told it's meant to be used for flowers) and glued them to a place where no one will ever really get to see them, thanks to the wheels.

As I was already fooling around with the wires I decided to set up the electric cabling for the main landing gear lights. To cover the shiny ends I cut small pieces of Tamiya's masking tape for protection and used white glue to attach the lamps to the hatches. Maybe using white glue was actually pointless for these pieces as the potential foggying up wouldn't be a real problem, anyway, but... when a thought is set, there's no way around it.
Somehow I expec that my masking will end up being a stupid failure and that the lamps will only end up a huge disappointment within a couple of project steps.

After taking these work-in-progress photos I glued the AA missile launch rails to the innermost points. For some reason I had decided that the order of weapons should be missiles first, then the single-serving heavy rockets and the rocket pods last. Why did I decide to do things this way? To provide maximum coverage for the heavily sown rockets, of course. Someone smarter can now feel free to correct me and point out my potential stupidities, but this is where my Mig is heading, despite the audience's pleas ;)

Hangings

Errrrr

As I'm really not familiar with any of the (semi)modern air warfare vocabulary, googling took me a moment. No matter, as I had accidentally built some launch rails instead of pylons, I ended up staring this pic from an Eduard AM set:

So, those topmost dark gray pieces seemed like the pieces I think I saw in photos of real (and model) planes. Once again I sliced off a handful of pieces of plastic at a decent looking scale, then I mengelefied those so they'd maybe remind someone of these pieces. In no way I dare to show any photos here, at least not yet . We'll see later if they end up looking better with a bit more cutting, slicing and filing or if I just end up hiding them in their proper real life places between the wings and their rocket pods.

[14.8.2013] edit: The proper names of those pieces are, as I was educated later on, launch rails and pylons respectively. Now the names are proprely edited into the text. Sorry!