The winter approacheth

While fooling around with many other things I had the time to make a mess of my tank the other evening. I was pretty curious to see how that camo I painted so many weeks a go would react to a bit of whitewashing. Immediately after the application the resultset looked a bit odd, but after a bit of waiting things got brighter.

Living in the moment

My idea was, again, to achieve a "field applied" kind of  winter camouflage. Maybe the guys got a surprise snowstorm while cruising around the French countryside and had to hastily apply a layer of thin white paint? This is how it ended at this point:

Back on track again

After these weeks of not building anything I've used a few good moments thinking of what and how to continue with this project. Earlier I left certain parts (tools and such) unglued with the idea of getting better access on the hull itself when I apply the winter camo. Of course it causes some head scratching: how do I glue them on and then apply the camo on them without ruining the hull's camo in the process? I decided that "it'll sort itself out" and went to do something else.

Trackage

That something else goes by the name of tracks. I don't recall fooling around with these Magic Tracks of Dragon before and they're quite a different beast from the Tamiya individual link tracks. This time I started by preparing two columns of track pieces long enough to provide the footprint for the tank. When these are deemed worthy I guess I'll work on the hanging track portion and finishing with the forward- and rearward sections.

These kitty paws are barely started

My old weird approach

It'll be the first time I try to assemble the tracks this way, so I guess a bit of swearing will be heard. My main point is that I'm not going to repeat my old method where I first guess (educatedly) the required amount of pieces, set them up and apply the glue. After a while of curing I'd just wrap the half-cured and barely connected strips of tracks around and hope for the best... Maybe preparing the tracks in a couple of different sections (painting included) will work better.
Then again, I do have a couple of completed tanks where this weird and slightly difficult approach has actually worked just fine, so it can't be completely useless. Just difficult and maybe somewhat unreliable, even.

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.

Vacationnnrgh

As my sudden three-week vacation started without a warning, it took me another week to realize that I don't have all the time for my hobbies. Sleeping is much more fun. So my tank destroyer has to be drydocked for a few weeks, waiting for its arrival to the next painting phase in my small and inefficient model factory.

As a filler replacement I offer random Minecraft-related stuff I waste time on every once in a while. Several weeks ago I got interested in testing the mods (TMI, Redpower, IC and BC) and the result of that is (or will be) a fortified village with a Command Contol Bunker underneath it. With a bunch of levers you get to turn on and off things like the village main power, street lights and what have you - the buildings will have their own light switches that depend on the main power line, obviously. That may sound a bit boring but it's quite a lot of fun to build.And occasional 'crafting doesn't take long and it doesn't require fooling around with paints and very unpredictable timeframes :)

The better houses and the market

Poor houses, shooting range and the library corner

Maybe I could dig a long tunnel and build an underground train from the bunker to my awesome ICBM silo...

Insignia time

The time of Balkenkreuz

Yep. I've been pretty busy last weeks. Despite that I sat down with my paints and did a bunch of Balkenkreuz on the model. One on each side and doubles to the rear side. And as my habit is, I did all by hand. This time I painted them relatively small, just for variety.

Running out of playtime

I'm afraid I can't keep fooling around and wasting time, soon I must attack the remaining pieces. The build order is just something I need to take care of first, so nothing gets ruined or ends up needing a bunch of repainting.
Most likely I end up making the wrong choice, but that's how it sometimes goes.

Steel paws of the steel kitty

Simple and short posts have been trending lately, I've noticed. This time I've painted the rims of the road wheels and attached all the wheels - excluding those obviously missing drive sprockets. Next up: random tools and the winter camo.

This has to be the record-breaking shortest message in my history...

A fancy camo job

Kicking my own arse

So I decided to get myself (and my act) together and started painting this bugger for real. The priming didn't really need much more, for it was mostly done. Which was pretty nice at this point in the project...

A hastily taken photo of the primed model

A simple and easy plan

I figured that  a simple approach would be the best one. Supposedly. In any case, unlike with my earlier german devices I thought that I'd apply the paints in a bit different order this time. Somehow that "start with Dunkelgelb and then go with the rest" approach didn't feel as nice as the previous project's "green goes first and the rest follow later".

Maybe the different painting order was better or perhaps I had actually learned something at some point. Or maybe the Lifecolor paints were better. There was only one way to find out!

From the pot to the jar to the tank

Round one

Vallejo's Verde Panzer got the greatest of honours and ended up being the basecoat. At some point in history I had diluted the paint a bit too much and the result was a bit thin. But that was fixed by applying a bunch of layers, so nothing was lost except a bit of time.

The green experience

Round two

Somehow it felt natural to apply the brown (Vallejo's Marron Panzer) stripes and lines next. They'd be a handy general pattern-definer to begin with. Then I'd paint the rest of the stripes in the third colour to break the form a bit more strongly.

It actually looks fun this way, too

Round three

As the obvious finale I filled the paint jar with Dunkelgelb that the chums at Vallejo call Amarillo Panzer for some odd reason. This paint caused some confusion because the airbrush occasionally spat half-dried lumps of paint out... Damnit.
The end result wasn't going to win any awards, but it's all my own fault. Big parts of what I painted seem to be at their best in the rear half of the tank and oddest in the front - no matter which model I'm working on. This appears to be a clear sign of "practice more" and "study yourself and improve" it.

Right side without tools

Left side, equally toolless

A part of the weirdness of the left side is caused by that I stubbornly tried to keep painting instead of taking an airbrush cleaning break that was clearly needed. As I said, my own fault. In any case, the oddness and imperfectness of the camo job isn't the main thing in this project. In addition to camo being painted by people this is also going to be whitewashed over in the end anyway. So it'll be just fine.

Background activity

Without any special mention: I did paint the road wheels, drive sprockets, idlers and those random items that belong on the outside of the tank. The wheels will be needing some manual painting a bit later, but otherwise they're done. Yay.

A green basecoat

This is a yet another photo-deprived posting because I haven't remembered to take photos of my small steps lately. After I got done with the priming and painting the interior of the fighting compartment white (including the rear part of the gun), I sealed the hull and felt smug.

Rumblegrumble

I wasn't smug for a long time, because the nose was grinning a bit. Of course I could've opted to have the chasm in the rear part of the tank but as that's a lot more difficult to fix and hide, I didn't go there. The hole got a good amount of putty on it and after a bit of smearing and leveling I left it to cure for a nice while.

This evening I took my files out and fixed what I could, then I wiped the surfaces clean. For some reason I didn't really want to have a layer of fine-ish dust under my paintcoat. Ultraexcitingly the next thing I did was to cover about 60% of the surfaces with Vallejo's German Tank Green. The rest I'll fix either tomorrow or whenever I actually have the time. That and the potential fixing that may need to be done if I find some annoyingly large bald spots on my tank when the paint has dried

And then?

When the green surface is set, I'll set up a random camo scheme with the brown and Dunkelgelb, maybe even with a set of selfmade national markings. Scratch that, I'm going to do that and we all know it already.

After that part is done I'll set up the wheels and the tracks and decide "that's almost finished now".


When I've declared that I've got the perfect opportunity to make more of a mess on my hunting kitty. In english it means I'll return after almost ten years to the world of water paints. Just in case I manage to make a better wintery whitewash this time, improving from my first attempt.
For a brief moment I pondered on preparing a base for this beast but maybe I'll take it easy right now. We'll cross that bridge when we get to it.