War. War never changes.

As my description is at least trying to say, I've assumed I'll be writing about other things, not only about scale models. My main reason is that I can't and don't always have the time to build and/or paint. Another reason is that gaming is another of my hobbies (coding for fun is one as well, but haven't had much time to do that lately...). These things work nicely together, for you can do both in different states of mind, weather and schedule: in 15 minutes you can either assemble something but it makes no sense to fire up Civ IV for that. Or half an hour isn't enough for an elaborate painting session but it's more than fine to kill a bunch of Crimson Lance fools. Just like one just doesn't always feel like playing/building/something, so options are always a pure victory.

I mean, playing through a Fallout in my style is a big and a long-lasting Project, so it fits under the topic really nicely :) Anyway, I'll prepare my short story with a long background explanation.

Oh, and before I continue, I'm warning about potential spoilers.

I won't be hiding any story parts or anything else, either, I'll just write what I come up with. There'll be a bunch of text and most of it is going to be just general ranting and all that, so maybe the "quality" of my postings will suffer for
this post - or maybe for every gaming-related post as well. Who knows?

My experiences with the Fallout series is such: second one I've played through a bunch of enjoyable times, Fallout 3 1½ times and this New Vegas one is still under progress, obviously. For some sick reason I've never got my hands on the original Fallout, my friends never lent me Fallout Tactics (they were always busy with it themselves) and the xbox-based BoS I tried once quickly at a friend.

The third real Fallout by Bethesda was something I was expecting with a great amount of curiosity: how can you turn this awesome RPG with turn-based combat into one of these modern real time 3d-thingamagicks? Thankfully the VATS sort of brought the shooting back to the turn-basedness, for the moments when real time shooting wasn't feasible (it's somewhat nicer to shoot down enemy grenades in VATS). VATS lets you aim at different body parts and gives the to-hit percentages to help in the decision-making. My old favourites from Fallout 2 (the eyes & the groin) aren't included! Blasphemy! Especially the eyes not being in the list annoys me to no end. What do you do with a good set of spiked knuckles if you can't pop your enemies' eyes out with them? Why can't I swing my super sledgehammer at that slaver's groin?

Now that I got to that part, you can aim at bodyparts when you're shooting, but if you're armed with melee weapons or just your fists, you can't aim at a specific part at all in the VATS mode! What the hell? You could shoot someone's knees off but you can't cripple them with a hammer? Why not? I'm waiting for a mod to fix this insane missing feature. Also, with my skills, I couldn't choose if I was punching or kicking, like in Fallout 2. Maybe that's not implemented. Pity, but not as much as the no-targeting-for-melee-weapons. Bah.

Ok, I mentioned mods, it's awesome that these new Fallouts can be modded to your heart's content. The games are nicely harsh out of the box, just like Fallout 2 was. Swearing, smoking, drinking (+1 charisma, -1 perception (or so)), slavering, whoring and all that plentiful more or less justified violence. Oh, you can also use drugs if you want to see how the addict side of the game world works, and if you aren't afraid of the withdrawals. Or you can join those aforementioned slavers, at least in F3, haven't got to see anything for or against in New Vegas.
I once got addicted to Nuka Cola in Fallout 2, it was pretty surreal: that was the first bottle I drank :D Those combat drugs give you bonuses and all that, but my fear of negative buffs from withdrawals have kept me away from them. For some reason this was all fine and dandy for our friends in Australia, but using morphine for greater damage tolerance (strong painkiller, anyone?) was not. It was scary enough for them to consider not rating the whole game, which translates into the game being practically banned in Australia. So Bethesda renamed morphine to Med-X and one of the first mods, and the first one I always install, is Med-X to Morphine. Despite my character using Morphine every once in a while I haven't ended up being a morphi- or any other nist, in the game or in real world. Tards.

Oh, and there was (is) one big instance of self-cencorship in these two games and that confuses me quite a bit, hopefully others, too. In the good old Fallout 2 I was running around Den (if I remember correctly, after Arroyo you find the first three places in this order: Klamath, Modoc, Den). There are numerous kids in Den and they do some pickpocketing. Once I got some caps stolen from me and I replied with a sledgehammer into his face. The brat died instantly and his/her corpse slid all the way to the edge of the map. I got my caps back and went on my merry way, back to Modoc. The locals had turned into less happy people, their speech texts were enemy-red and replies were pretty harsh. One of them attacked me and after the thing escalated into a bloodbath I decided to run away, for at that early point in the game I wasn't quite up to an ethnic cleansing of the village... yet.
Anyway, after getting away I checked my stats to see what the hell could be wrong, what was my status among the groups I had contacted already. I noticed that I had a brand new Child Killer perk among the few ones I had already had. I decided that things weren't how I wanted them to be so I loaded an earlier save and let the kids be in the future.
Well. If you end up pickpocketing them and dumping some lit dynamite or C4 in their pockets... they die all the same but you don't get the negative karma :P

For their own reasons the Bethesda team decided that in their game this won't do (and obviously the kids in these games are just as annoying as in the movies). Naturally I, to protest, got a childkiller mod to Fallout 3. I only used it to try it out. Funnily enough, if blowing kids up was doable out of the box, I'd avoided doing that like the plague itself. Now that it's forbidden and you have to mod your game to do that... Blah.

Maybe I get to my real topic now?

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So I got Fallout New Vegas as an xmas gift in the spanish tradition: the sixth of January (reyes magos, three magical kings). Almost two months have elapsed and according to Steam that means roughly 35 hours of game time. Nowadays I play semirandomly from ~30mins to ~2 hours, depending on how I feel and all that. And when I feel like it.

I'm in the very early stages of the main storyline. I mean, I've only solved a couple of short "go there and ask about who shot you" tasks until I got to Vegas' the Strip. In the very beginning you get to know that you were a courier and were carrying a platinum chip, someone caught you, took the chip, shot you in the head and buried you. Apparently the attacker was a clueless retard or you were just plain lucky for you survived. The first mission is to find your killer and get back the platinum chip to complete your job. After one or two of these "go there, talk to someone" tasks later you hear that the killer was someone called Benny and he lives in the Strip. Nice. It's just not that easy to get there. The straightest route is full of Deathclaws and the detour gives you a ton of more quests. I solved them however, what sounded most interesting (= less deadly) or was just around the corner already. While doing all that the map got populated with more and more markers and those ended up giving even more quests or small tasks to complete.
The variety of bigger and smaller quests go from the classic "get a needle from the haystack, take it to the pharmacist who gives something to be taken to someone who gives you candy and 100 exp" to "Gather a mob and defend the town from escaped prisoners", and awesome quests like "Find out who sold my wife as a slave so I'll shoot him/her in the head" and "Hire a ghoul cowboy to do soem 'escort' stuff in my bar", not to mention some honest mercenary stuff.

While doing all this, running amok around the desert I've raised my dude's level to almost 22 (out of 35 before any DLC) and only now I dared to go to the quarry that's crawling with Deathclaws. There's a Deathclaw Mother, a Deathclaw Alpha Male (didn't remember those when I got there...) and a horde of smaller ones of all sizes and ages. So far all my attempts of trying to sneak by the quarry have ended quickly in myself being torn from limb to limb and my poor friends being eaten. All this in less than half a minute. Now I went into the quarry and started sniping them - without a real sniper rifle, of course. Now I survived because I went on the ledges so the monsters didn't always get to me and my friends on the first or even the second attack. Still it took a couple of dozen attempts. At one point I realized that the Alpha Male always storms the same way so I run, dropped all my 38 frag mines in the same pile, ran back, attacked from a distance. He went head on to my trap, crippled his leg and it still took me. Raul and the robot a ridiculous amount of time, tries and ammo to kill that bastard. Of course it's just correct: there are places where you shouldn't go if you aren't tough enough, you'll get killed in a heartbeat. And if you are tough, you're still not guaranteed to survive. In the early game, armed with small worn out pistols, tire irons and wearing a leather coat it's a suicide. Now, weating a Combat Armor, armed with various rifles, laser guns and explosives, it was still a challenge. Awesome!

At the moment, based on what I've seen and heard in the deserts of Vegas, there are two main groups against each other: New California Republic (NCR) we know from Fallout 2 and Caesar's Legion I've never heard before of. The NCR has spread its area of influence from the distant-ish California and the Legion is a brutal, apparently pro-slavery group. At some point the Legion people got angry at me and went from neutral "says hello when crossing paths" to "shoot at sight". I guess I was in too good a relationship with the NCR.
I haven't decided who I friend in the end (if I can choose, that is): NCR who seems to be a bit rude and I didn't like them at all in Fallout 2. And when you chat with the Legion's representative, they have a fun-sounding approach to life. We'll see how the thing proceeds and what I hear if and when the background stories get revealed a bit more. As the more recent happenings go, both NCR and Legion reps promised that my "possible crimes against them will be forgotten" and that I should go and have a chat with them. That NCR ambassador I met already for he was just behind the corner but I'd need to travel quite a bit to meet Caesar. I guess my quests will take me closer to the southeast corner of the map soon, so I'll talk to him too, when I get there.

Or maybe I'll just stay with Mr. House, enjoy the security provided by some heavily armed robots and spend all my different monies in the casinos. Oh, I found Benny all right. I threat.. persuaded him to have a private meeting and beat him to a bloody pulp with my spiked knuckles. He tried to get me to join him and his team, he also promised some quests and stuff, but revenge is sweet and I didn't want to have those spiked knuckles being smuggled there for nothing... Maybe in another life.

For the first time it's happened to me that I've ended up developing the speech skill quite a lot in Fallout New Vegas, it's actually quite useful. In all the earlier games I've either bribed (and then stolen my caps back) or burned my way through so this is quite an exciting new thing to me. Always, especially in Fallout 2, I've made some sort of a kickboxer thief (unarmed + pickpocket + small guns), now I'm more like a Han Solo type of a loud guy (guns + speech + melee weapons). Yeah, I know, Han Solo isn't a melee dude but I like it and hadn't thought of this before, maybe survival would've been good for this type of a guy.

I guess I'll stop now and continue in another post, no one is going to read this kind of an endless rantage :P

Lock S-Foils into attack position, deflector shields double front

It ended up looking pretty neat after all. Now I just need to come up with a good idea for the base & support, but that's just a bonus. I've been suggested an asteroid and I thought of something like a Star Destroyer's surface or something where I could build a tiny Taim&Bak XX-9 Turbolaser tower. That could be cool. Let's see what happens in the end.

Aside from the slightly modified Pilot figure, this is a straight OOB build. Nothing else has been changed and as far as I've understood, painting is something that you do always, so it obviously doesn't make this any less OOB, even if the kit was prepainted. Especially the engines show that a perfectionist would've had a ton of puttying and sanding to be done. As everybody can see, I'm not either a perfectionist or suffer from ASM. This looks good enough to me, I'm satisfied with it and that's what matters :)

I will return to this when I've got something to report, that being a completed base, but otherwise this project (1/2011) is now completed. Took a couple of weeks, the second idea and attempt of a paint job was good and I didn't really ruin anything at any point. This is actually working pretty well! Of course these are one of the famous last words of a modeler, part "too many to count"... Next I'll either mumble about Fallout or a SdKfz 251/1 and its crew, depending on how I feel.

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Here are a couple of final shots of the Pilot in his tub with his trusty R2-M2 astromech droid. Those pieces are just a bit too small for my hardware - either of the cameras - to get good, clear pictures even in the macro mode. Or maybe I'm just too dumb for these things.

Our history affected the even older history in the legendary GFFA

The aluminium coating with olive green anti-blinding paint and darkgray whateversripes that I started the last time is more or less completed. Of course I did things funnily here and there because I didn't really know how certain things would work out. So I'll explain a bit what I did and how as awhole, even if a part of it is some sort of repetition from the previous post.

First I painted most of the model with Tamiya's flat aluminium and a selected few panels with Vallejo's gunmetal gray. The contrast difference between those panels was too strong in my opinion so I fixed the problem by repainting those panels with aluminium to get a uniform-ish surface. I also found the green anti-reflectory part in front of the cockpit looked a bit too short to me compared to the lenght of the model's nose and a full-lenght thing would've looked silly too. A bit more was painted but so that there was a nice-looking strip of flat aluminium between the sensor cone and the olive green part.

The surfaces of the laser cannons (Taim & Bak KX9) I painted with gunmetal, except the counter-flash pieces that I painted with the aluminium paint. Of course I wanted to get some of those hull panels look a bit darker than the rest so I mixed a bit of the flat aluminium with Vallejo's Oily Steel and painted a random few panels with my mix, whatever looked good. In the end it was a couple of panels in each side of each wing and a couple in the bottom-rear part of the hull.

After all of that had dried nicely I coated everything with this new Citadel (or are the paints under GW's flag nowadays?) black liquied called Badab Black. That stuff also dries matt unlike its glossy predecessor. The whole model was painted with this thing and I saw that it was going to be good. Earlier today I was in the finishing up stage of the build and I fixed some of the minor foulups that I noticed while dry-fitting the pieces together.

The shallow semi-openings in the undersides of the S-foils I repainted black to cover the earlier metallic leaks. While doing that I paid more attention to the surface texture of the engine parts that are visible and decided to add some details to them by painting some of the wires with red and yellow. Just in case someone looks at the model from a good angle and good light. While I was at it I painted the first front panel lines of the wings with the same Vallejo Grey-Black that I had used on the sensor cone. The business ends of the ion engines (Incom 4L4 Fusial Thrust) I painted white and later with my 15+ years old Citadel Blue Glaze, which still works unlike so many newer Citadel paints... That was to get some sort of a running engine effect to the model. And yes, I know that in ANH those parts are red-ish but this is a prototype and blue is always so much more Imperial.

As a pretty finish I painted all the new surfaces with that aforementioned Badab Black and stared at the results:

I wasn't quite sure of how the modified and slightly larger Pilot was going to fit in his tub (and the cockpit window over him), so I took it easy and didn't put the pieces together for real, so I'd avoid any last moment fuckups. I mean, that would've pissed me off at this point because it actually looks nice, even if I say so myself. In addition to the final construction and photos the only missing element is some sort of a stand. Have to make it myself, I guess this model is just to be whooshed around until it breaks. Or something.

New but old paint scheme idea for the X-Wing

My Imperial Pilot is awesome, I don't need to poke around with it anymore. Well, maybe a bit of blackwashing it, because I got some complaints about the chestbox. "Does he have a space mushroom from Tintin and the shooting star or what's the thing growing on his belly?" Well, it doesn't look like that anymore and it's a lot better that way.

So I was painting the hull gray, as I had planned to make a couple of layers of gradually lightening gray to mimic the look of Imperial Star Destroyers. After the first one had dried I noticed my mistake: the panel lines were light gray and that looked repulsive. That's something I did and accepted when I made my first tank (Revell's 1:72 StuG Early w/Schürtzen), but that's not acceptable anymore. I had been stupid again.

So I dug out my half-dried Citadel's black ink, thinned it down a bit and covered all areas with it. There, now the panel lines are as they're supposed to be. Hrmph. Of course the whole thing was splotchy black all around and I stopped to ponder a bit about the next course of action.
Accidentally as I met an online friend yesterday we at some point ended up talking about this build, too. Two heads think better than one and we thought of the american WWII fighter planes and bombers. I mean, that's where the space fight scenes and all came from to Star Wars, as everyone knows. If WWII was good enough for the Flanelled One, it's definitely good enough for me as well!

Ages ago I finished a one quarter-done bomber kit that I got from a flea market (I think it was a B-24), mostly aluminium coated, a green area to prevent the sunshine reflecting from the surface of the plane and making the crew blind and black stripes on the leading edges of the wings. We were thinking of other planes, like the P-51D as an easily googleable example. The thought was interesting and my mental image of my model in that scheme felt good enough so I decided to go that way with this build.

This evening / afternoon I've been doing the new first layers. Now that I set the kit and paintbrushes to rest, I noticed that I have to fix it later. As usual. But all in all it looks fun (for a change the photo isn't the smallest one around):

Now that I decided to upload a bit bigger pic, I gimped a couple of things to comment on. The blue markings show where the anti-reflecting part is, both on the front of the canopy and really small patch behind it (there's a small rear window). Maybe I'll extend that front patch to the nose cone, it might look a bit better.

Green points to the nose cone. It's gray-black to represent a non-metallic material that the sensor suite, radar and all the other electronic devices can see through.

Red things point to the centermost parts of the wings, they'll be completely hidden by the hull so the bad painting and extractor marks are meaningless. Just in case someone ends up commenting on something somehow somewhere, those parts don't need any fixing ;)

The original idea was to make some sort of an imperfect surface, that's why most of the hull is painted aluminium and some panels are painted gunmetal. But as it is, the tone difference is a bit too strong to my liking so I'll repaint all those aluminium and tone them darker later, to make a bit softer transitions. Those "engine wells" or whatever they're supposed to be that are located in the wings, they're going to be darker than the rest of the wing. That is completely intentional.

Oh, and at this point only the visible half of the wings is painted, the rest I'll paint later. Tomorrow or over the weekend, we'll see. And if you look really carefully, the leading edges of both wingsets are painted black like in the B-24 link a while earlier. Or that's what it's supposed to mimic.

Maybe this ends up going somewhere after all. But as usual, it'll take a while. Again.

Fixed bucket

Of course the wrongly made bucket ended up haunting me... So I took my greenstuff out again and rolled a nice piece to make the needed shape. I left it to set and later I covered it with black. Maybe I should've  got some sort of a glossy thing to make the helmet shine a bit? Oh well, maybe some other time.

While I was fooling around I also painted the engine intake vents, the warhead launcher wells and all the blue markings of R2-D2. Now I have to come up with a better designation for it. R2-F6? Dunno, I've still got time.

I doubt I'll ever post this much in such a short time again :p

My attempt at modifying the Pilot

To begin with I dug up my old greenstuff and a roll of legendary trick-wire. Can't translate that one, sorry :P I guess everyone's familiar with greenstuff: it's a two-component thing that you can mould and carve when it's set. In the container it's made of two separate strips of blue and yellowish stuff that you need to mix to get that green stuff done. Surprisingly.

To follow my idea that I presented in the previous post, I randomly made an extra lump around the pilot's head. After that I cut two very small pieces of trick-wire and bent them to fit nicely:

Later in the evening I got my paints out and quickly covered the guy in black to begin with. While he was drying I went and checked a couple of reference pics. Only the bucket, boots, gloves, chestbox and the pipes are to be black, rest are to be a bit lighter. So after the paint was dry I covered the overalls with Vallejo grey black and left the guy drying again.
When that was fine I did a couple of small white rings to the shoulders and to the left and right frontsides of the helmet. And then a small black asterisk-like thingie in the middle to make it resemble the Imperial emblem a bit better. Silver or metal would be more correct in this case but as white shows better I decided to stick with that. Finally I did a couple of white and red dots on the chest box.

As is a recurrent habit of mine, only when I was done and was looking at my reference pics again I noticed that I made a small mistake. That helmet is supposed to have a low mohawk-like shape on it. Sigh. Maybe I'll fix it tomorrow or maybe I'll just don't give a damn and decide it looks good enough through the smallish window. We'll see.

Startup 1/2011

This project is (was) supposed to be a light snack before returning back to the WWII thingamagicks. Maybe I manage to stretch this one over many weeks again, even though the thing itself would be done in less than five minutes...

We're talking about a Revell EasyKit series X-Wing, also known as Incom T-65 space superiority fighter. For most of my life I've been some sort of a Star Wars fan. Nowadays I'm a lot calmer than what I used to be, but I guess that happens to all of us at some point. Despite that everyone who knows or pretends not to know me, knows what I think of the rebellion and all such humbug.

Originally the model depicts Luke Skywalker's Red 5 during the battle of Yavin. These Easykits are some sort of "welcome to the world of scale modeling"-things, that don't require any fooling around with paints or glues. Supposedly. It does look like something as it is, but after removing the pieces from the sprues there are some paintless spots. And it's a bit funny in general. At least in my opinion a blue barberhsop-like twirly thing in the laser cannon is a silly.

Everyone knows the behind-the-scenes story of the X-Wings but I'll summarize it quickly anyway: Incom was developing a new starfighter to the Empire, their model T-65. But those bastards defected to the rebellion with the prototypes, causing some ruckus. I don't support such stuff so I decided that I'll modify the whole thing so it's a prototype for the Imperial Navy.

The first thing I did after my last finished project was to clean and rearrange the working area (the side table of the kitchen) so that I can evacuate my junk whenever the table is needed for kitcheny things. From my awesome lego xmas calendar I got a handy plastic tray where my Vallejo paints fit like a dream. The remaining old Citadel/GW paints - some of them I got to use once before they dried up - don't fit that well but I'm phasing them out anyway so that's not a real issue.

This is a lot handier than my old "these paints are in that box and those are ... there"-themed dynamic random archive. Of course it needs to be adjusted and fine tuned, but I've got the time. And anything's an improvement.

But now to the business. I opened the box and checked what it contains (instructions included) to avoid the problems I had with my previous build. A couple of sprues and an almost pointless instruction sheet:

Naturally the next step was to cut the pieces off the sprues, clean them up and dry-fit them to see fi they work nicely. And to see what I need to fix. In the end I glued the engine pieces to the S-foils because they were grinning a bit too much on their own. I left the wings as they are because you can't change it between the normal flight mode and combat mode. Normally I'd call that cheating but I guess you can't demand all the awesoments from this kind of a kit. In the foreground you can see the pilot that's going to need most of the modifications. But I'll get back to that in a moment.

During the next couple of afternoons I rebasecoated the pieces with my trusty Vallejo gray. No interesting stories or legends about that:

When I get to the third phase I guess I'll paint a couple of lighter layers on select surfaces, aiming for a sort of "Star Destroyer White", as the Imperial Navy has it. As a bonus detail I could try to paint the Imperial insignia somewhere and maybe something that smells like a "prototype". Obviously that's a bit difficult 'case there's no real definite way to mark something as a proto.

Meanwhile I'll attack the dude in those awful orange overalls. In case my greenstuff isn't completely ruined by time, I could go for a new helmet for him and use some metal wire to fix the TIE Pilot tubes. The helmet itself doesn't need to be a normal Pilot bucket for the X-Wing has a life support system, unlike TIE series of fighters.
That idea wasn't my own, I even got a photo hint, though I don't have a clue where that pic is originally so I can't give due credit to the owner.

Maybe I get something like that done, that'd be cool. But we'll see how it goes when I start fooling around with Yet Another Thing I've Never Done Before...

Project 4/2010 is completed

Last night I finished this damn AA-cannon. Naturally I had to fix the right side shield, just like I suspected last time.

I thought that hey, I'll be efficient and drill a small hole with my handy pin-vise to both the shield's connector and the receiving end, glue a short piece of a paperclip to give structural support ("pinning"). WEll, I half-succeeded. The receiving end was easily drilled but the other one... no way. It's diameter was a bit too small to allow any sort of safe drilling even with such a small drill bit. As my second option I used white glue and superglue. That works almost as nicely but isn't nearly as genial and nicely hidden.

When the gluings had set I covered those areas with a bit of paint and attempted to weather the whole structure a bit with different browns. In the end I got carried away and applied the weathering stick I started using with my Sturmpanzer project. I guess it looks like something now.

As a whole this set was a bit weird. Of course I take full blame with the photoecth-failures, I'm just new to them. I'll do better in the future. To add insult to the whole thing, I managed to paint the lower right sector shut! Didn't see it in time, didn't dare to attack it later, because I was afraid of breaking that thing off for the umpteenth time.

But that instruction set... it was problematic. Mostly because I stupidly believed that it was going to mark all the optional things as such, like it claims in the legend, not to mention the good practice and politeness. In hindsight: I should've read the instructions carefully and write a huge "NO!" to the parts I was going to do differently. As a result I would've got the pose I visioned when I started this build.
Now that I followed the guidelines blindly, I noticed some frellups a moment or two too late. In the end the FlaK is in the driving mode as opposed to the shooting mode I wanted (barrels level, aiming at a wave of enemies).

While I was building I was wondering the aiming system. That piece that connects the aiming devices with the elevator system couldn't have been attached properly in any other way than how it is now: aiming high. If the barrels were any lower, it wasn't attachable between those two. That's somewhat weird, I think. Maybe an actuator(!?)-like plastic thing would've been a bit too cumbersome and difficult to produce in this scale. Had I known (and got the skills), it would've been scratch built just to get the gun how I wanted it to be.

Oh my, the time. Took a couple of weeks more than what I initially said, in my delusions of grandeur. For that reason I'll keep myself from making any those claims in the future ;)


Next time we'll go to space! Yay! Space! Awesome!

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.