Stormcrow and Viper detailing

Finer details over the basic scheme

Like I've mentioned many a time already, I really liked painting the bare metals as dark grey instead of using metallic paints. This was one of the cases where I definitely was going to keep at it.

Bare steel surfaces

The Stormcrow got its shoulder joints, some leg joints and the lasers painted grey. I also painted a handful of grilles and vents as well to make them stand out more.

 

I gave the same gut feeling -based treatment to the Viper: lasers, missile launcher's face, the AMS pod, and some easily doable joints. The AMS made me think if I should've painted it in a brighter grey or off-white, but this wasn't an aircraft carrier from these years but a futuristic wonder. So I left it unpainted to make it stand out more, even if technically it didn't make perfect sense.

 

Some chipping

For gentle highlighting I started using the Soviet shade (VMA 71318 AMT-7 Greyish Blue) I had used as the main highlighter on the Mongrel, but these had a stronger contrast and my original idea didn't work the way I imagined. Pivoting like an agile developer I decided to turn them into chippings and added some more with as light a touch as I managed.

The third, darker colour would enhance these chips noticeably.

Yellows

The Blitzkrieg Galaxy's crossed lightning bolts got painted on the left legs on both Omnis, again with Yellow Ochre (VMA 71033). My photos didn't show too clearly how boltlike the freehanding was, my bare eyes helped even less.

Again the Stormcrow's back didn't really inspire any caution stripes, but Viper did that much more happily. Some part of that came from the Jump Jets, that Stormcrow didn't have.

Preparing the cockpit canopies

For my jeweling attempts I based the cockpit glasses black. I knew that yellows were always a bit difficutl, but like in all these long cases, I was now paying for quick choices made over a decade ago.

This was another half an hour. Total timer: 1h.

Stormcrow and Viper of the Delta Galaxy

Delta Galaxy's greys and blues

As we had seen here before, Delta's scheme was grey with blue highlights. In this first stage I thought that this time I wasn't going to go for a spectacular camo but leave it mostly grey. Thinking of it, the Mongrel's camo scheme didn't stand out that much.

The grey mass

Over the black primer I overbrushed a layer of my trustworthy Cold Grey (VGA 72750) and allowed the shadowed lower parts to remain darker.

 

To bring out the surface details I drybrushed all this with Stonewall Grey (VGA 72749). Again, I let the shadows be.

Highlighting in blue

This time I used UK Mediterranean Blue (VMA 71111) for highlights and just did some panels and chunks based on my gut feeling. The Stormcrow had fewer pieces that called my attention, especially in the back, so I thought I'd give the hands something new.

Viper already had more blue bits, so I thought the hands also being blue might've been a bit much, so I left them as they were. Another option was to paint them steel grey, if the lighter grey was a bit too much.

I purposefully left enough bits grey so I'd have space to mess up my Clan and Cluster insignias instead of painting some blue on another shade of blue. This showed that I actually learned something from Doomguy Urbie's UAC insignia.

This stuff took about half an hour and that made me decide to roughly track the time usage in the posts again. It had been years since I did that the last time. Time spent: 30mins.

Project VI/24

The final Salvage box, and a friend to go

As so often, I was pondering what to do with the mini at hand. I didn't want yet another Medium Point into my 3rd Falcon Talon Cluster, but the opposite actually, as I felt I ought to turn my Cluster's average further to Heavies and Assaults.

Then it struck me, thanks to the seed of an idea from months ago when thinking where to put Grendel A. To accompany this one I plucked one of the unpainteds from the Clan Direct Fire pack. Now we'd top up the Clan Ghost Bear / Delta Galaxy / 73rd Battle Cluster / 314th Battle Trinary / Star x in my collection.

At some point this year I had primed a couple of handfuls of miniatures black, so I didn't need to worry about it. That time was also not included in my tracking.

Miniproject V/24

Lego 10338

A couple of years after Optimus Prime the next Transformers Lego was released this summer. I wasn't nearly as excited about this one (the Goldbug version was for some reason more to my liking) so I hadn't ordered this as my first thing after waking up on the release morning.

My partner reminded that if this one sold well, maybe there were going to be more. In addition to that piece of wisdom, Bumblebee was a neat character so I wasn't really fighting myself much when I encountered the box in the shelves of Verkkokauppa.com the previous weekend. And this was the reason why we didn't jump from the 1940s to 30350s without a gentle sidestep.

Bumblebee

Building the set took a bit less than two hours in the same Sunday afternoon I bought it. The rest of the family unit were watching cartoons while I was smiling happily by the table.

The roof could either take an Autobot emblem or be left plain with a flat 2x2 plate. Clearly I chose the emblem.

Two options were available for the register plate, I opted for the model 1984 as the one presented first. The other one went into the spare part pile.

On the left side of the hood I could again choose between a marking and more yellow. I had no reason to save the emblems anywhere, so I put it on also for the comic book effect.

There was a tiny bumblebee trapped inside the car. What looked like a hifi set behind the windows turned into a jetpack in the robot mode. That was something I didn't clearly remember from the eighties, but that was a few years ago, so...

Volkswagen Type 1

We ended up with a cool beetle!

 

The robot mode

With a gentle amount of twisting and turning the VW Beetle turned into a smirking rohbut. The instructions emphasized the leg and torso angles with separate pics and the reason became pretty clear when you stood the robot on the table: standing straight like an arrow he'd fallen on his mechanical nose as if struck by scraplets.

Maybe I had some more shelf space for a couple more :D

Finished: Project IV/24

SdKfz 161/1 - Panzer IV 7,5 cm KwK 40 (L/48)

"The tracks rattle, the engine roars, the Panzers are rolling in Africa" sang the Sauerkraut-enthusiasts, according to my purposeful mangling of the lyrics, while the fortunes of war were somehow on their side. This DAK Panzer IV Ausf. F2 had eaten most of the summertime, and got done surprisingly quickly despite this last schoolyear being an example of the infamous and untranslateable ruuhkavuodet [fi]. I poked my model whenever I had the time for it, and enjoyed my time.

Border Model

I had talked about the bits and instructions while I was on the build, but I thought it was a decent idea to type up some conclusions as the maker was a new one to me. Like I said in the first post, I grabbed this from a local hobby store, Tieto-Nikkari, after a good chitchat with the dudes working there.

The instructions were basically fine, some of the pics just were a bit unclear on what in the Empire was to be done. Not that I hadn't complained about this same thing on some other manufacturer's instructions, either, so this was not that unusual. One of the examples of these "say what?" moments was the turret upper front corner -located hooks: the how to build image didn't really clarify a thing, but an image a few steps later showed the completed thing that showed clearly what I was expecting to see. 

Another source of grumbling was related to the optional pieces. There was a huge amount of different bits, and this was exactly what the instructions were the least clear on. Or maybe this kit was aimed for those who lived and breathed these details. I clearly wasn't one of those, so I ended up with the set of optionals that came up first in the instructions. The only extras that I actively decided to leave out were the track links, as I didn't want to mix up the kit's own and the Panzerwerk Design's track links, and some of the side track armour pieces had T-34 links and I didn't expect to find them in numbers in North Africa.

Just about all of the pieces needed an amount of cleanup (and the photos showed how I failed here and there, even if my own eyes and fingers told me I had gotten the irregularities out), some more than some others. Mostly the mold lines were handily positioned and the fitting of pieces was absoutely great. I did the amount of dry-fitting I did out of my own paranoia.

The pieces also looked fantastic, I had repeatedly admired how nice-looking and detailed they were. Then again, I wasn't widely known for my golden ears or impressive expertise, so you should take this praise with a grain or two of salt.

In case I encountered another interesting kit by Border Model, I could foresee myself grabbing it with me without much pondering. This one was very nice, thumbs up.

Panzerwerk design

These were the second third-party tracks I used, my previous experience was from just a moment ago, early 2000s (while working on the King Tiger two years ago I thought it was about 17 years ago, so...) when I played with Friulmodel's ATL-22 tracks.

3d printed tracks, at least in this one instance, were nice and quick to assemble as soon as I had found a workflow that worked for me. The tracks ate paint well, and painting didn't negatively affect their movements. In all honesty I was pretty damn excited about them all the time and I certainly would order more of their tracks to a yet unbought tracked vehicle.

Method testing n+1

Modifying the smooth plastic pieces to be more steel-like by using glue to soften the plastic up did just what Uncle Night Shift promised. The surface looked much better. In this model I also tried the next step further with the glue-thinned putty, but my implementation suffered from the putty I used. I would have to try this one out again with a different product.

I didn't keep that much track of how much of a difference the better and worse puttied surfaces, and the ones that had just the stippling done on them. With the orange skin effect on some parts was a clear issue and my putty-glue goo was too thick and dry when applying. Later I bought some Tamiya putty, but that would be tried with a new model.

Painting

Being boring was a risk with a monocolour desert yellow sceme, just like with a plain 4BO vehicle. Tools alone weren't going to bring enough variety, so the oils had an incredibly large effect on how the model ended up being. Another thing I had never done before was the highlighting of raised bits after a wash, but this time I foreached boltheads and upper edges. Maybe I had expected the result to become a bit too cartoonish or WH40k-ish, but my assumptions were incorrect.

Unlike my previous single-colour tank, I hadn't thought of making this one badly mistreated or weather-beaten, so the chipping wasn't as big an item in my variety-increasing toolbox this time. Of course I added a few, but a few indeed and in my opinion onto key places. Oil washes and, to a lesser extent, the sand pigments carried the heaviest burden.

Unwashed:

Thoroughly oiled:

Of course there were many stages between these two photos, in addition to the photos being taken under very different lighting conditions, different cameras (phone vs a DSLR) and whatnot. I hoped it was enough to show the difference.

Time usage

Thanks to the hecticness of everyday life I mentioned earlier I got lost with my timekeeping from the get go, both with my documentation and naming of photos. So I had no clue of what kind of time I had spent to be even remotely accurate. Most of my modeling sessions lasted 30-45 mins, so an average of 40 mins per crafting session shouldn't be too far detached from reality. The 270 WIP photos I had somehow divided into nicely round 16 groups, which would translate into something like 11 hours, but I was pretty certain this wasn't quite that rapid.

A handful of hours could be pretty safely dropped on top of the guesstimate and assume that bit more than two full workdays could be a decent timeframe for this tank. Of course the defragmentation of my time usage was suboptimal, as setup and teardown procedures ate an unreasonable chunk of time, and it was worse the less I got actually done. As we all very well knew, context switching was damn expensive.

Imagery

So here we were. Another new manufacturer has been tried out, a new paint scheme, and a detailing method. The strange thing was that I was suspiciously content with my doings yet again, and that was strange indeed. At least the photos left plenty of space for improvement, so I wasn't in the immediate danger of becoming totally delusional.

 

 

Next time we'd be again in the environments of the year 3050. But war. War never changes.