Project I/25

Schweres Wurfgerät 41

When I left my previous workplace, about 8 years ago now, I got this as one of my farewell gifts. The Soviet tank I got done ages ago, but the rocket launcher got stuck in some limbo while larger things were worked on. But now I was going to get it done.

I had built a Tamiya's two-summery-figure version (35155, Schweres Wurfgerät 41 "Heulende Kuh") many, many years ago. That one was funnily an inverted version: the rocket launcher's frame was metallic and the folding-leg crates for the rockets were wooden. Amazingly I found one (well, two, but the other one was way worse) photo of the model, that I also hadn't shared in my 2012 Nebelwerfer post:

This Dragon's set gave us a wooden A-stand where the metallic rocket crates, Packkiste, were then laid on for firing. The included cabbageheads were also in more wintery uniforms, and there were five of them. Luckily I still was bad at painting living things.

Construction instruction

Hah, this was going to be easy: just four steps! Somehow I expected the step 2 to eat a good few hours, as everything in it was photoetch and any bends I needed to do were practically not tool-assisted. The painting hints were given with codes for manufacturers whose products I didn't own [anymore]. Basic stuff in this projects.

Bits and pieces

Four rockets:

A wooden frame for the rocket cases. The idea was a bit weird to me, a fixed-angle indirect fire. In case you wanted to aim your fire nearer or further, you had to relocate the whole setup. The version that the old Tamiya kit depicted was smarter in that sense, as you could at least change the angle to some degree with the screw-feet or by playing around with the boxes' tiny legs.

And here we had the five guys in their winter coats. I think the last time I painted a human figure was for the U-Boat's captain who was much simpler to paint than these camouflage-wearing rocket artillerymen. A fun detail was that this multiskilled gang originated from a 120mm mortar team.

This amount of PE was the largest I had ever encountered in my doings. It was going to be interesting to say the least.

It was going to be a curious project, and I had no real idea of how much time and headscratching this was going to take in the end. Those five humans were going to be the biggest weirdness, that was my expected result.

Project V/15

Sienar Fleet Systems TIE Interceptor

It's quite probable that I'll be blabbering endlessly how the TIE Interceptor is one of my favourite scifi ships ever. In the Star Wars universe it's in the hottest top with Star Destroyers, Lambda-class shuttles, Nebulon-B Frigates and the classic TIE/ln fighters.

Ancient memories

Closer to two decades ago I built a T/I model, back in the day when I was still painting with Revell enamels. It was a very nice model, I recall, even though the pilot figure the kit had looked more like Yuri Gagarin with his spacesuit and I didn't know how or dare to customize it. Therefore I didn't add the pilot to ruin my model.

The only photo I had in my archives

A pocket model

Let's cut the nonsense and get back to the modern times. This Revell kit would most likely not be as neat, but we'd find it out soon enough.

"Easykit pocket" is what the packet says and it claims that no painting or such would be needed. All I could do was laugh. The box revealed a small pair of wings, two spruefuls of prepainted pieces, two difficult-to-mask windows and a most likely pretty useless instruction sheet.

But the pilot figure, that one amazed me. It actually looked a bit like a Pilot of the Imperial Navy! I didn't check those tubes too closely, so maybe I'll end up redoing them. The chest box itself looked a bit underdone or half-done. Some light customization was waiting for me, hooray!

Kuat Systems Engineering Firespray-31

Years ago I took it as my business to build and paint Boba Fett's neat ship. This modified patrol and attack craft wasn't easy to paint like its real life counterpart, as you can clearly see from the photos. In hindsight I could say that I started my weathering nicely, in my own opinion at least, but today I'd do a lot more and stronger. Back in the day I was happy with the model and it looked good to me. I guess I was just a bit cautious and didn't want to ruin what I had already achieved.

Slave I

Captain Solo

Lambda-class shuttle Ondiv

Because I've been so very productive this summer I thought it was time to take a couple of weeks off. To compensate, I'm sharing more treasures from my archives! Sadly these old photos are awful, thanks to my bad equipment and even worse mindset that I suffered from back in the day. I just didn't care enough of the proof. I'm awfully sorry and ashamed.

It's always the same

There's actually a short and typical (to me) story behind this model. Back in the elementary school I visited the Fantasiapelit shop with my friend every once in a while, just in case they had something interesting. At this time I had already bought and built my first MPC-manufactured Imperial Star Destroyer model. Once I noticed a box containing another MPC model, the Tydirium from the Return of the Jedi. I was really interested in buying it because I had always like the ship itself but I didn't happen to carry those 100 FIM in my pocket at that point. Of course I could've walked those 20+ meters to the ATM to get that (I didn't even have a debit card at that point in my life, just a simple ATM card, mind you), but I was stupidly lazy and thought that "I'll buy it the next time."
Of course the next time happened to be the very next weekend. Guess, if that kit was available anymore? No, it wasn't, that one box was all they had ever had in that shop, as far as I know. I swore like a pirate.

Attempts to rectify my situation

A good bunch of years later I started - to torture myself I guess - browsing eBay and of course there were unopened boxes of this model. But how could I have bought one at that time when I didn't have a credit card and neither did anyone I knew, for some reason or another. I couldn't and that's how it was.
Many more years after that, when I had finally joined the broadband world (yes, the story and I are both that old) I got to know and even became friends with some people on the other side of the Atlantic.

Somehow I agreed with one of them that she'd bid for one of those kits on my behalf, send it to me and then I'd pay her back for all her trouble - obviously. There was one question: "how high are you ready to go?" and my reply was simply "I need that :P". The following day I was the happy owner of an old model kit and all in all one hundred euros poorer. Yes, instead of paying 100FIM I paid 100Eur (about six times more) but I guess that's how it goes when you waste ten years...

That packet took quite a while to get here, a few weeks even. When I finally got my large box in my hands I noticed curious markings on its sides. As everyone knows I live in Finland but for some obscure reason my box was first sent to Thailand instead, where they rerouted it somewhere else (IIRC it went back to States according to the logs) with a friendly "out of gors" scribbled on top. Dear USPS people, what's the difference between Finland and Thailand, hm? :)
Didn't matter, I was happy to get this model at last and I showed it by bouncing around the office, to the amusement of my coworkers.

Assembling after a 10 year wait

There's not horribly much I can tell about the assembly, other than some faded memories, so I'll skip most of them. One major issue was the joining of the right side wing and the hull. It was either badly done or I had ruined something while building (the left wing went in and worked just fine), because switching from the landing mode to the flight mode and back wasn't smooth at all. So I had to cut and file a bit to get the pieces together.

The world of choices

While building I noticed that one has to make a permanent choice at some point: which mode it's in, flying or standing. If it was going to be standing on its landing gear, it couldn't be set up in the flying mode at all because the landing bay doors would block the wings. And if it's flying it would stand on its belly because the doors would be glued shut. Somehow I had thought you could alternate between these modes freely but that was not the case. Of course if the landing gear was built as retractable, it would've been way too flimsy to support the weight of the model.

The ramp opens!

I decided to build it more or less complete in the [landed] mode, take a couple of photos and then finish the model in the [flying] mode. This is because I definitely wanted to have it flying around instead of sitting on its armored butt. It's just a huge, huge shame that the few pics I took are so awful :|

There's not much to say about the paint job itself. It was done with a paintbrush + some drybrushing, with Revell's enamel paints - two shades of gray. Some gun parts were painted with Citadel's Gunmetal (for some reason I thought at that point that guns needed to have metallic parts) and the engine ports were painted with Revell's glossy white. Somehow I didn't take any publishable pictures from the rear side of the model and I didn't remember to take new ones for this post, sorry.

SHU Ondiv

Because this project wouldn't have even been started without my friend Ondiv, I named the vehicle after her. Oh and besides, there's been enough of Lambda-class shuttle models named Tydirium, don't you think?

Mode: landed

Mode: landed

Mode: flying

The hammer of war

A spark

During my years in this hobby I've poked my nose, among other places, in the Warhammer 40,000 universe. Actually the whole scale modeling and "let's paint small things" thing bit my when I was in high school, when my friend Joose showed the Hero's Quest pieces he had painted. With my other friend Mika we thought that we could do the same with our Space Crusade games. These two didn't keep painting stuff for long but I seem to be still on the same road.

I still have that game somewhere in the closet and I think that the pieces are just plain awful, but maybe I could take a photo or a few to show where and how I more or less started all this. Some of them were so ugly that I had to repaint them later - but still ages ago so they may be only marginally better but pretty bad despite any "improvement" attempts of mine :P

Sinking deeper

Even though Space Crusade has a nice amount of varied pieces, they didn't last me forever. So I ended up going by Fantasiapelit every once in a while to get more crap to work on. If I remember correctly I had some imperial stormtroopers, space marines and because I liked the attitude, a Basilisk SPA unit (it was also a neat target marker on the board as opposed to an empty or a few-blip-infested room).

Then at some point, maybe it was because I liked the first Dawn of War RTS I invested in a metallic Dreadnought thingamagick. They've got flamethrowers and they can pick up their enemies and swipe the hordes with them - how can you not like that? Because I didn't have a deeper understanding of the Warhammer universe, I decided to take a safe route by doing a Blood Angels unit. Besides, one of the marine teams in the game was Blood Angels to begin with.

A red warmachine

My recollection of how I built this thing is hazy at best, but I do remember very clearly that the right arm was a project of its own. The connectors didn't fit together at all so I had to trim down the rod and carve up the hole so they'd fit at some point. Because of this the right arm is in an unusual-ish pose, to hide the small remaining gap. If I remember correctly, you could put an enemy figure in the raised arm to be thrown around and that it looked amusing.

The whole was basecoated black and then a bunch of layers of Citadel's Blood Red was applied. Those grappling fingers were painted with a Revell's metallic copper, metallic parts and worn off areas were drybrushed with either Chainmail or Mithril Silver - whichever of those I happened to own at that point. Tin Bitz was used on the exhaust pipes, that was a new, experimental paint for me at that point. Green lenses in the Left and Right Torso are just a dab of Green Ink each and all those bone/skull/wing decorations are first drybrushed with that metal paint and then redrybrushed more lightly with Skull White. That was the gist of it, at least.

My baseplate was again basecoated black and then simply drybrushed with whichever of the Citadel's greys I happened to have and that's all. The skull(s) and spent casings were done just like similarly coloured ones on the Dreadnought itself.

Oh, and those decals? I applied enough of them so that it wouldn't look "nude" by accident. As a whole I think it's a very neat thing even though I didn't have a clue about the item itself - not that I know more now. One thing that jumps out of the photos to me is that smoke grenade launcher, and I can't recall if I did something to this thingie after I had taken these photos... I'll take a look at my storage to see if that red beast is still somewhere or have I forgotten it to my parents or something. I also decided not to glue the torso to the hips because I wanted to torsotwist for the pics. And I'm not going to go and play with this piece so it didn't need to be sturdy for gaming purposes.

A superstylish finished piece

I'm the first one to admit: these photos are beyond awful. There's just nothing I can do to them anymore, really. Maybe my original idea was to take better photos at some point. Or maybe I just didn't care in the least. Do try to survive, ok?

That's this week's weirdness. For the next one I'm really going to try to get at least something done to my Jagdpanther. I've kept telling myself that for a couple of weeks already, but I'll prove myself one of these days ;)

Diorama: Pesterers

Idea

Years ago I got an awesome idea (at least I thought it was awesome) when I had started fooling around with BT miniatures. In all its simplicity the idea was this: an Atlas being swarmed by Elementals. Being a fanatic Clanner it was pretty obvious how the idea got worked on, nor did I need a lot of time to ponder who the combatants would be.

Participants and the field of battle

The Clan of my choice was naturally Jade Falcon and the Cluster the 3rd Falcon Talon - the same I chose for my Clusterful of miniatures. As the victim I accepted ComStar's Com Guards and that led me easily and funnily the cursed Battle of Tukayyid. Based on the story I decided that the Com Guards Third Army - whose units I painted in my Introbox project all these years later- would be the perfect fit in my diorama. The paint scheme of the 3rd Falcon Talon Cluster was very familiar already because I'd chosen it years ago and painted a few Stars in it.

Building

The first phase was assembling the Atlas in a comfy and neat-looking position. For some already forgotten reason one of the details of my plan was that Atlas would have something in its hand for some Elemental swatting. Atlas itself wasn't problematic at all after I got the slightly wobbly hip section cured. I left the hands (those that require the Hand Actuators) last so that I'd get the tree trunk into a good position.

Before I started painting the 'Mech I grabbed a set of plies, a drill and other useful things. With those I dug a couple of holes and dents in selected spots in the structure, where I wanted to see what my five one-ton Elementals had caused damage on the one hundred ton BattleMech.

Atlas

There's not much uncertain about the paint scheme of ComStar's units. Anyhow, I started basecoating the whole thing black, then applying layers of increasingly lighter grays on it, leaving crevices and such darker, while finishing with a light white layer. All sorts of gun and missile ports I darkened a bit while applying some brown on the legs for weathering purposes. Those damaged areas I did pretty simply: first I liberally applied largish black stains over the general areas and then painting the dented / punctured armor parts themselves with a silvery metal paint. That's not the prettiest of ways but it was the best idea I had at that point.
I also tried to do some jeweling for the first time on the eyes. The idea was to make the eyes glowing green from dark to light. Surprise of all surprises: my first attempt at jeweling didn't quite go like in the tutorial. Not that anyone claimed it was going to be easy, anyway.

In one of my moments of insanity I decided that I need to paint the insignia by hand (as usual). On the left shoulder I doodled something like the ComStar's insignia. Maybe, maybe with some good intentions and if you know what you're supposed to see there you can tell it's the ComStar's star. But if you don't? No, not really. On the box on the right hip I tried to paint the insignia of the Third Army: a perching falcon.
Yeah, right. Representational art is definitely not my cup of tea.

Trickery

The tree trunk I made nicely from a piece of plastic tube, from one of those cotton swabs. Those things are damn hand, I say, for I've built a number of gun barrels out of those! With a few lumps of white glue and some filing combined with some splotchy painting I finished with something that reminds one of a tree trunk. Let's say it's a pine so there's no reason to worry about the nonexisting branches.

One funny idea that just occurred to me while assembling the whole thing was that "what if one of the Elementals was shooting at the Atlas in the leg with its Small Laser?" I drilled a tiny hole into the right arm of one of them and glued a short straight piece of a paper clip in. Later I painted the metal red and had another go at slight jeweling by lightening that red with white as far as I dared without going into pink. Somehow I didn't want to have a pink hello kitty laser beam in my piece of manly art :p Finally I attached a piece of torn cotton to the end of the beam and dirtified that a bit with black and gray. Just to make it look like it was hitting something.

The Elemental swarm

Like all the other Elementals I've painted these ones were members of the 3rd Falcon Talon Cluster: first the whole suit was painted green. Then I applied something camo-like with gray. On top of that went some drybrushing with lighter gray. The visors got a bit of glossy black (could've been my already dried up Citadel's Black Ink) and the SRM launchers got normal black on the ports. Each Elemental got a stripe of Vallejo's Jade Green for trimming on the front edge of their SRM launchers, as the 3rd Talon does. The Point Commander got a mohawk-like stripe on his/her helmet, so one could find the main Elemental from the chaos.

When these guys were done, I glued them around the Atlas in random but in my opinion proper-looking places. One's climbing up the rear leg, one is just about to do something mean to the backpack, the third's working out around the right biceps and the fourth is at the neck with mean intentions. So, in the end the Point Commander ended up being the one kneecapping the enemy before joining the swarming attack.

The baseplate

Being a cheap guy I tried to build a gameplay piece and glued the Atlas on a hex base. For my diorama I dug out a round baseplate that I had got from a random WH40k piece. On that round slab I tried to set up some sort of a terrain shape with putty and what have you. I left an opening for my hex base so I could attach and detach my Atlas from the base for gaming purposes.
Of course I realised later that it wouldn't be a good idea because of the swarming Elementals. In addition that kneecap-lasering Elemental would've always caused problems during the operation. So, in the end this one ended up being a permanently unplayable piece of art, which wasn't a problem anyway, because it was somehow to be expected. I just tried to circumvent that.
My terrain ended up being like I always do them: a sand base, some random greenery here and there and this one also got a puddle / wet ground (Vallejo's Still Water). That's pretty easy to do and in my opinion it works just fine.

I like it.

Fogging around

From the deep archives

Years ago I spent a good while searching for a nice 1:35 scale model of a Nebelwerfer, finally I found one by accident while ordering something else (could have been a 1:35 Soviet D-30) from Combat Models. Obviously I couldn't turn that one down so I ordered that too. Sadly at that point in history I didn't take any work in progress photos, I only took "this is how it ended up" photos to bother people I know.

edit: I found a photo of the box, updated 23.9.2013

Thoughts

Weathering the barrels worked awesomely, I thought back then and I still like the effect. At least I was pretty proud of them, when I had the model finished. Somehow I got the idea of using some random thread to make the cable/wire for the launcher, I believe it worked pretty decently. Especially when you put the launcher in the hands of a 88FlaK36 gunner.

At that time (2001) I used enamel paints and just about nonexistent tools. I also didn't have many completed models under my belt, either. This Nebelwerfer was something like the third, fourth model in the 1:35 scale, as I had started with Revell's 1:72 tanks.