Fixin' the mistakes - or trying to, at least

That's how scabby the upper torso and gun pods are or were a day ago. Not good enough for me, not by a long shot. Though, in a sense that kind of a mark could represent something that was gently caressed by an azure bolt from a PPC or a beam from a LLaser. In any case I slapped pieces of 0,5mm polystyrene to cover the scabs and filed the edges down a bit to make them stand out a bit less.

It doesn't look any worse, at least. Last evening I went and rebasecoated the whole thing because this had gone beyond reparation with mere painting skills... Not that those pieces bother me, this isn't supposed to look like it just walked out from the assembly line ;) One of these days I start repainting it with some german panzer green, hoping it looks better than my previous attempt. We'll see soon!

That moment between vacations has begun again

The first set of vacations came and went, the trip to almost-in-laws ended with a bit of bringables, as it's a sign of a good vacation. To fix the Marauder and to prevent the same ones happening with the Warhammer I got some Tamiya's Putty and 0,5mm polystyrene sheets. Of course I tried first if a quick re-application of black wash helped. It didn't. So I'll take and repaint those couple of things completely again, what else can I do? Maybe I'll lay a piece of plastic to hide some scars on the Torso and gun pods. We'll see, though as long as the weather stays as hot as it is and the calendar tells me it's not a weekend, I'll do something else because spraypainting in the balcony under the evening sun doesn't work for me right now...

Naturally I had to get something new as well, it's not fun otherwise. In one of the shops I saw a model of the Kugelblitz but as it want to support my favourite toy/hobby shop in Gijón (Capua Hobby's), I skipped it. During my hobbying years I've built the main types of the Tiger series so next in line are the Panthers, at least the Panther and Jagdpanther. The latter being the latest entry in my TODO-queue.

At the moment my plan for that beast is to do a triple colour camo and on top of that I'd apply a light "field applied" whitewash, just like with good old Hobbes. This time I'll make it even better.
As if :P

Cave Johnson here!

This is an awesome quote. I laughed for real when I first heard it. That's not a surprise to anyone who's had to listen to my stories even once ;)

"When life gives you lemons, you gotta do lemonade, right?"

Cave Johnson, CEO Aperture Science Laboratories

"Alright, I've been thinking. When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade - make life take the lemons back! Get mad! I don't want your damn lemons, what am I supposed to do with these? Demand to see life's manager. Make life rue the day it thought it could give Cave Johnson lemons. Do you know who I am? I'm the man who's gonna burn your house down! With the lemons. I'm going to to get my engineers to invent a combustible lemon that burns your house down!"

© Chris "ammnra" Myles @ Flickr

Found a couple of neat examples with google, just in case you felt like watching/listening to a bit more:

Some genious had done this in Minecraft and I approve of it! Bravo!

Clickety-click, blam blam

I've posted a couple of times about these gaming projects between a bunch of modeling-related posts, even if I'm not the best one to write about games or gaming. Some change is nice every once in a while, so I'll comment a bit on my New Vegas adventures. I have to do that pretty briefly because I can't remember where I exactly left this thing the last time.

While working with mr. House I adventured through the whole map and did all the sidequests that I found. The bothersome thing is that the levelcap struck so damn early. I should've installed a mod to get ten or twenty more levels. Not that I needed them to complete the game but because I enjoy hearing the ka-ching sound every time I do something worth something and get some experience. It's a bit late to complain about that now, but anyway.

Most of the House-specific went mostly just like the ones for Yes Man, this time I should've prevented an assassination but because the other factions didn't trust me at all ("shoot on sight") after a couple of misunderstandings, that quest wasn't even tryable. Oh well, who cares, I didn't like the target anyway ;) In addition to that the only mentionable difference I can think of was that I used a couple of skill magazines (+10 Speech, +10 Barter) so I could talk to Lanius to get a peaceful conclusion with him, just for a change. Of course I put down that NCR general and his bodyguard because he got on my nerves. I didn't even consider negotiating with him to solve things peacefully.

At some point, when I had the time, I started playing the endgame for the Legion. Because it's the endgame already, not much changed from the previous two attempts, so there's not much sense in repeating the same stories here. I got to play surgeon with uncle Caesar's head and I had to do the simpler solution because my medical skill was one (1) point too low even with the skill mags! Well, I'll do that the next time, then. The important thing is that now I got to be the assassin at the Hoover Dam. Didn't come up with anything more interesting than planting a bomb to a Vertibird (once again that Patriot's Cookbook and its +10 Explosives saved me), but I guess you could have a couple of different approaches like sniping from a tower or filling the platforms with mines.
The end fight was interesting and nicely different this time. I also got to see the Boomer's bomber at work because it wasn't the middle of the night this time. As the icing on the cake I got to execute that cocky general Oliver. Which is always good.

"Firestorm coming closer,
Napalm to the bone"

Now I have just the "working for NCR"-story to be checked and that's definitely not a horribly exciting thing because those NCR people are just suspicious and plain

---

Of course I went and got Duke Nukem Forever, haven't got far yet. Just a couple of hours worth of fooling around, I've taken my sweet time.

The beginning is somewhat unsual for an fps game but that didn't bother me mentionably. There's a bit of walking around, looking around and listening to what people say. And fooling around with the environment. Then you get to drive a bit and after that the shooting gets to start for real. So far I've got out of the Lady Killer casino, got through the Strip to the Duke Dome and fallen down to its basement. Based on this I can't understand why half an internetful of nerds have thrown insane tantrums...

Ok, the humour is incredibly bad ("poop, ahahahahaha!" or "Hotel Fellatio, khihihihi") and Duke's oneliners are just as bad as in the good old '80s action movies just like it should be. No one *forces* you to pick up poop from the toilets and to throw it around. At least I wasn't forced to do that.
Otherwise all the extra stuff you can do is more or less how it was in the previous installment: you can fool around with the lights, play the pinball/nineball/one-armed bandit and all that. This time you can really play them instead of just "using" it and hearing some noises. Oh, and each new thing you try or game you win gives you +1-+5 Ego boost, which means maxHealth.
The only thing that has got on my nerves so far is the female characters. All three have been annoying, screaming bimbos, I don't want to hear them in my games, it's enough to hear that in the train stops in the real world... Oh, and the levels seem to be straight pipes, that's a thing you can and should always be complaining about.

The action itself is quite nice. Monsters attack and you mow them down. Some monsters stay far and shoot you, some of them rush straight at you and some just warp around and cause a nice amount of panic when they surprisingly find themselves behind your back. Sometimes an enemy falls on its knees for a while and you can execute it for your amusement. For some insane reason (consoles?) Duke can only carry two guns at the same time, but luckily the pipebombs and tripmines go to their own slots and don't count as weapons. The famous Ripper is very nice but it eats through its ammo painfully quickly.

I think that the graphics are more or less at the same level with the other 3d shooters nowadays, I can't go and call it ugly. All these cool effects are used from motion blur, focus-thingies to those things I can't remember how to call them. Lighting effects and water effects look neat and when you stand in the shower your sunglasses get wet and in the steamy pipes they get steamy. Well, I saw those "crap is on my screen" effects for the first time in Metroid Prime, so what?
At leat I haven't read a single comment that tells with some examples, why they call DNF ugly.

No, I really can't understand all the crying and bitching that people have had with this. Maybe I'm just weird or maybe I didn't expect something impossible. With my experiences so far, Duke Nukem Forever is some good old-fashioned shooter fun.

Suffering for my "art"

The contents of this post is supposed to be little and short, for a change. We just had a neat heat wave in here combined with a very nice summer flu and that didn't really invite to tinker around in the kitchen's corner. Obviously the main reason was the flu, because I quite enjoy assembling and painting in the bright sunlight.

Those stupid-looking seams started to annoy me quite a bit. At first I tried to file them flatter but that didn't really go anywhere. So the next logical step was: take the Dremel out and start dremeling!
The end result wasn't quite as smooth as I had hoped but then again, is that really a horribly bad thing in a warmachine? Not in my opinion. Anyway, I started repainting the surfaces (top torso, gun pods, legs) once again.

Now that I look at how my fixing attempt looks like on the green elements, I just feel like throwing all that crap out of the window. Damnit. I really, really wouldn't want to repaint the whole model or anything... But we'll see what happens.

Maybe it's a good thing that I'm going for the first half of my summer vacation and I can just leave a couple of more random posts to be automatically posted at some point, so this thing stays alive and I don't need to stress about it at all.
Not that I *needed* to post once a week or anything :P

An attempt at the pattern of the Omega Galaxy

To celebrate a Monday afternoon I attacked Hobby Point in my quest for plastic jewel-like things. They've been recommended in the CBT-forums as focusing crystals for energy weapons, mostly on the miniatures but I thought that I'd give them a try with these two models, should I manage to actually find something suitable. It's been said that they look better than flat pieces of plastic painted with different colours, even with skillful jeweling (that article talks about cockpit jeweling but obviously it works on other parts, too). After a bit of asking around, this is what I got:

Of course I had to try them out! I dropped one of the bigger blue pieces in the slot and to my amusement it fit like a napalm bombing in a forest. Excellent. Then I tried one of the medium sized red pieces in the smaller opening. That one fit snugly, too. Lucky me. With the primer that red jewel didn't really show too well so I tried with a green one instead. That one was a lot more visible.
The point with all this is that the energy weapons need a focusing lense, -crystal or something similar. Of course I could've just got something lense-shaped and smooth but for some reason I felt that a diamond cut would look a lot better. With the colours I could tell what kind of a weapons this model has. Obviously PPCs have blue crystals and different sorts of lasers have their own colours. So far I've just painted all my miniatures' laser nozzles plain red, without any regard for the size (Small, Medium or Large) nor the type (normal, ER or pulse). I've never thought that I'd make normal lasers and pulse lasers look any different, so I guess I could go with small = red, medium = yellowish, large = green. According to the specs this 'Mech has a pair of Medium Pulse Lasers so I'd use yellow/orange crystals in the gun pods.

It works.

Later I checked that yes, the red crystals are clearly visible as well, after the gun barrel was painted with Flat Aluminium.

Next I had to test if the Omega Galaxy's pattern would work or if it ended up looking awful. So I started with a couple of small pieces and painted them with Tamiya's Flat Aluminium:

After that had dried I washed it with an ancient (I bought that paint more than a decade ago) Citadel Green Wash:

The first thing that came to my mind when I saw that was a Spearming bubblegum... not good. I let it be overnight and washed over it with GW's Badab black and at least that part looked a bit better that way.

Next I went and painted the rest of the torso and arms with Flat Aluminium and greenwashed it later. While applying that green wash, I decided that some AutoCannon parts should be left plain metallic to give the whole 'Mech a bit more detail. To me it looked more stylish this way.

After all that had dried nicely I applied a layer of Badab black on the whole set. In addition to that I also applied another layer of GW's Devlan mud over the metallic pieces.

I'm afraid I have to file those insane seams a bit, they look bad. Should've done it earlier, but for some reason I didn't. Oh well, they won't offer much problems, I assume.
After that I shall start working on the legs, maybe basecoating them with either Oily Steel or Gunmetal, followed by a black wash to keep a bit more uniform look on the whole model.

Project 3/2011

Finally the Marauder and Warhammer that I had received in January, had gotten to the top of my FIFO-based TODO-list. Unlike mr. L, who attacked his Warhammer first, I went directly for the awesome Marauder that I've "always" wanted in one scale or another. Sadly the playable BT-scale Unseen Marauders are pretty difficult or impossible to obtain, so these'll do just fine at this point.

So, I started on Wednesday evening by opening the box and wondering, what it contains. Three spruefuls of pieces, an eight-step instruction sheet and a sheetful of waterslide transfers that I archived away immediately. This walking tank is not going to be a silly anime toy but the emperor of the 31st century battlefields: a Marauder IIC.

Firstly I snipped pieces off the sprues, cleaned them up and built what was to be built, just like the instructions told. While I was test-fitting the foot pieces I noticed that because they're movable, it wouldn't be a good idea to leave the insides like they are. I quickly painted just about all the insides of the white pieces black so that I wouldn't end up swearing my lungs out when I finally noticed that despite all the time spent painting this thing nicely, all I could see were the insides of the war machine, being white as fresh snow...

After a while I decided that finished arms, legs and the hip piece were enough for the first spring, so I documented my doings and packed my tools away. For the next round.

While I was tinkering around the next evening I noticed that the instructions suggested somewhat weird things with the wrist pieces. The gun pods would turn sideways and that'd leave them in a ridiculous angle when the guns point wherever. So I mengelified the nicely glued seams with my x-acto knife so I could pry the pieces off without causing heavy, permanent and irrepairable damage. With a bit of heavy swearing and support-taping I got the arms fixed the way I wanted them to be. In hindsight: I should've played with the pieces a bit more to see how they'll end up being to prevent this happening yet again.

While the arms were drying I attacked the Autocannon that's located on top of the torso. As the piece was a long one, it had to be taped to keep it tightly connected while the glue dried. I also decided against cutting the gun barrel open and I just left it as it was, I didn't see it worth the hassle.

I added the rest of those decorational and supporting pieces to the torso. I can't even guess what that spherical thing in the front was in the tv-show but in this model it'll be a sensor window or something. Or at least I'll try to make it represent one :P

Of course I had to test-fit them a bit, after the pieces had dried for a good while. Looking good, though the bottom could be a bit heavier to give some more balance to the model as a whole.

Because there were so few pieces missing from the torso, I decided to add them too. All that was missing was a couple of antennae and the Jump Jet pieces. After this all the building was done, nothing was missing from anywhere anymore, the arms and legs don't need to be glued to the torso at all.

Today I eagerly started basecoating the pieces - while waiting for the Duke Nukem Forever demo to be downloaded. They all were done nicely in two sets: first the top and sides, and after a few minutes for the paint to dry, the last surfaces. After yet another paint drying break I tested if the pieces still fit together. It still looks nice. Himmel, I haven't met many models that are this quick to build! Though, as we remember from earlier Spring and the experiences with the Imperial X-Wing, it doesn't matter how quickly it's built - it'll take a while to paint it anyway. But that time is really nicely spent :)

Now I really have to ponder what to do with this thing. Personally I'm such a fanatic Jade Falcon supporter that I was going to paint these in my "own" unit's colours. That's Gamma Galaxy's 3rd Falcon Talon Cluster, but my game master Viiru said that "I don't approve of old junk to be painted in the colours of a Frontline Cluster :)" and he's actually quite right with that. He suggested painting these in the Star League Defence Forces pattern, but after consulting a couple of sources I have to say that the SLDF pattern is a bit boring and as I said, my Crusader heart beats for the Clan Jade Falcon.
To my joy I found a reference that lists the Jade Falcon Touman after the Battle of Tukayyid, if I remember correctly. For a while I searched for a proper unit for both of my 1:100 'Mechs and then I found it: Omega Galaxy - 8th Falcon Regulars
, apparently a Second Line Cluster. It's more than likely that their view of Clan politics isn't something I'd tolerate but I'll worry about that a bit later. This way I'd get both of these tin cans in the same Cluster, Trinary and even the same Star(the Talon Star of the Trinary Charlie). Not bad.

The most important thing to find out right now, is what colour they'd be, if I chose this Galaxy and Cluster. According to Camospecs the pattern would be a "metallic emerald green on top and a steel finish on the lower halves of their equipment. This symbolizes Jade Falcon`s superiority over Steel Viper. Red paint is splattered on the feet and shins of their 'Mechs to indicate their intentions with the Viper Clan". I may have to browse a site or a couple, not to mention several pdf's before this is settled. But right now it sounds decent.

These are very, very important details.

One more build is now completed

Not much was left to do. I washed the rest of the weapons and a couple of items just to bring out some details and give some variety to the guys. Oh, and I remembered to add the missing rank "buttons" on Herr Leutnant's shoulder thingamagicks. To keep the acquired level of insanity I went and painted the Deutsche Afrika Korps insignia to the boxes on the sides of the halftrack and scribbled the unit markings both to the front and the rear of the vehicle. The latter looks more like a doodling of a five-year old kid, but that's the best I could do now.

Those waterslide transfers are cheating.
Oh, and I didn't add the register plates. They'll survive without just fine.

View from the left

The right side

Nose

The rear end

It doesn't quite look like in the picture...

That's it. Those photos are somewhat weak because I took them quickly with my n900, but maybe I'll get to take a bit better ones with the real camera and update again. But now I have my mind set to the next project already! Where in the world am I going to find all the tiny extra pieces I think I'll need?

Detailing my tiny desert übermensch

I kept painting my poor miniature men without any real break. The coats looked a bit dull as they were so I drybrushed them with a bit of Iraqui Sand that I used to paint the trousers. With a single flat colour those things end up boring so drybrushing brings out the highlights pretty nicely. But why am I rambling about these things? Back to business!

The last time I left the skin areas of my mininazis chocolate brown, now I painted them liberally with Vallejo's Medium Skin Tone so that the deepest recesses still had some chocobrown to give a sense of shadows. Then, after a while of drying, I highlighted parts like noses, chins, cheekbones, ears and fingers with Vallejo Dark Skin. For some cosmical reason that dark skin is actually lighter than medium skin tone.. but I guess they're just from a slightly different palette. In any case, they finally started looking like people.

The next evening I spent with the coats and accessories. My main theme was painting belts, bayonettes and other decorative elements. Belts got a Chocolate Brown coating, except the straps for the water bottle and ... whatever that small box is on the back of two guys. Those got a grey-black strap, just to give some kind of a variety to the setup. All the belt- and strap buckles I highlighted with metal colour and later I'll wash them a bit to tune the shininess down a bit. Then I painted the shoulder flaps with green, as these are plain old infantry. Those things got a thin white lining and the man holding the binoculars got a dot on the thingie, he was supposed to be a Fährnrich (a second lieutenant), but I made it to a wrong place... should've checked before doing. Guess I'll paint another and give him a promotion to a lieutenant, so he'll be accurate again.

Somehow I also dared to have a go at the eyeballs and irises of these tiny people. Thanks to a paintbrush set that I got a couple of years ago, especially the three-hair 5|0 detail brush, everything went awesomely without causing a mess or swearing. I could almost get excited about this.

And indeed I got excited. I kept on my sick attempt of adding minute details by freehanding tiny shields to the helmets. One side should have a silver nazi eagle on a black shield and the other one is a black/red shield with a narrow diagonal white stripe going through it. And it ended being acceptable at least:

After everything got dry, I put the helmets on their owners and tried how they could be posing when the whole thing is done. A couple of those guns are going to cause some trouble, I may even have to tear some arms off their sockets like a mad Wookiee...

Beam crosses and brown faces

After posting the last entry I continued painting the fenders. When both of them were coated nicely I slapped them on the hull. After the glue had set nicely I mixed a bit of Dunkelgelb with an even smaller amount of white. The end result was slightly but somehow lighter than the base colour, just like it was supposed to be. I set the model in my painting box so that it was resting in a pleasant 45º angle enabling me to spray the paint exactly from top of it.
It doesn't show too clearly but maybe it worked somehow?

However my attempt went, the model doesn't seem to be ruined.

Next I struck my paintbrush on the machine guns. First I painted them simply grey-black, on top of that I drybrushed some metal colour and finally painted the handles brown for some wooden looks. Pretty simple but works nicely enough in my opinion.

After the guns I painted the outside tools, first the metal parts with that grey-black and then the handles with brown. To decorate them a bit for a worn look I drybrushed some steel on appropriate surfaces. The driving lights and the side view mirror I just painted with flat aluminium. At least the driving lights should be washed with a light yellow to make them look a bit more like headlights. Or maybe some thinned down black wash because the lights aren't on. Hmm. I'll ponder on this a bit still.

While random paintjobs were drying I cleaned the crewmembers a bit and glued their bodyparts together bit by bit. Later I noticed that I had forgotten several mould lines despite my attempts to inspect all pieces thoroughly. Oh well. The main thing is that as a whole they look better than if I had just stuck them together without any kind of cleanup...

Crew mostly in pieces

In the end I decided that I'll assemble these guys completely, excluding the helmets, before I paint them. For a while I had thought if I should paint their arms separately but then I decided against it, it could end up looking a bit silly (and needing touchups afterwards anyway). So I'll save myself the trouble of working on the same parts repeatedly. Soon we'll see how this ends up.
On a side note, I don't think I've ever added all the gear on these tiny guys before. For some reason I've never dared to go into the arms race with these 1/35 or 1/72 -scale guys. The larger scale people have mostly been just tank crews and the Hummel's gunners without plenty of gear... where are those SP-artillerymen anyway? Those small scale guys have had an insane amount of junk with them despite the smallness... and it scares me :P Water flasks, bayonettes, gas mask containers, bags and pouches. We'll see how this one goes, at least these are bigger than those ultratiny 1/72 bits.

They're just missing some paint and their hats

All that crap fit surprisingly nicely on their waists and backs. The guns are going to wait for a moment, though, for obvious reasons. The first round consisted of their uniforms being painted with Vallejo's Green Ochre and after a short paint-drying break all the skin parts and their boots were painted with Vallejo's Chocolate Brown. Of course my plastic aryan supermensch are going to get a lighter skin tone during my next painting session, the brown is just a hopefully good base colour for the recesses and such (reverse highlighting?). At least brown is better for that than plasticy gray, in my opinion.
Next I'll paint their trousers with Vallejo's Iraqi Sand and maybe drybrushing the coats lightly with that same paint to give them some definition - that green ochre is a bit too dull alone. I've got two skin paints (Vallejo's medium flesh tone and dark flesh, if I remember correctly) to be tried. I'm hoping that these guys are going to look like they've been in the sun a bit already, not like they just got to North Africa. If I feel really daring, I'll try to do something about their eyes and mouths, even though I can still remember how awful my last attempt was. Detailing the uniform shouldn't be too difficult and I'm not going for anything too daring, anyway.

Paint coat after the first phase

I also tried to freehand some Balkenkreuzen to the sides of the vehicle. The small ones I painted on the sides, rear and front I approve of, but that monstrosity on the nose that shows mostly in the air... that's just awful. That'll need to be fixed. Quickly. Small insignia are easy to paint freehand, without fooling around with masking tape or anything, but that one just went wrong. *sigh*

You can't always win, but you can always lose.