Captaining

Fast-forwarding

Apparently my evidence recording conventions have got weak lately, as I almost completely forgot to take any photos of the puttying and sanding stages. Not that there was much to see, but the principle is what concerns me. What I had done was that I had applied an amount of Tamiya's putty to cover the insane gaps and rents and then sanded away the worst lumps.

After that I had glued his arms on in a "I just lowered my binoculars to look at something with my own eyes" position, or that was what I was aiming for anyway. Again I puttied gaps and after letting it cure over the traditional 24h time I sanded the excesses away. I even glued on the head, even though it may have been a bit easier to paint off the torso. Being a bit paranoid I decided that I'd paint it on its proper place to avoid making a fingerprinty mess by accident or plain carelessness.

Airbrushing

Now I primed the guy and his unattached hat with Vallejo's White Surface Primer. Then I proceeded to blast his pants with Panzer Dark Grey (VMA 71056), his shoes or boots plain black (VMA 71075) and finally his coat department with German Grey (VMA 71052). These colours were chosen by my googling results.

All the rest I'd do the old-fashioned way. I am completely and totally aware of the fact that no marine historian would accept this coat as a correct one, but I was looking for a long coat that could be called a raincoat of a U-Boat commander. At this point I was already thinking that maybe with a creative use of varnishes I could get a neat splashed wet effect by first using a satin varnish and then using some gloss varnish on the splashed on surfaces. Maybe.

A mumbly half-dozen

http://makeitstranger.com

VI

Six years and an insane amount of inane mumblings. That's how I'd summarize my this year's milestone post.

This time I'm not going to go to the details of the Projects, photos of them or the stats, as the date once again surprised me. Maybe I could say that I hope that my text or the general style of mine has if not improved, then at least got to some sort of a baseline level of even "quality". That's how I feel, especially if I make the mistake of checking an noticeably older post for linking or fact-checking.

Still I have the feeling that I repeat too much of the same sayings, sentences or sentence structures. But what can I do about it, especially as I'm writing this just for myself. Nonetheless, occasionally someone else apparently ends up checking something, not necessarily to read a word but perhaps taking a look at the photos. And that's cool too.

Project VI/16

Still far away from my comfort zone

My huge submarine was still captainless. My last attempt at painting humans succeeded rather well (my SdKfz 251/1 project was done five years ago already I, II), so why not give this another shot and paint another dude for a bit of a different situation?

The starting point

I had bought, ages ago, a Rommel and his staff box by Dragon, that contained four guys. According to the box art at least one of the not-Rommels had a long coat and that was good enough for me. I also remembered when buying this kit that people had praised Dragon's figures quite a bit. Not that it mattered that much to me, with my skills you couldn't tell the difference between the best of plastic figures and a barely ok one.

There were two sprues inside, one with the men and their rags, while the other had a mountain of accessories, like binoculars and pistol holsters for a few HQ units. I thought that at this point I'd be more than fine with just one pair of binocs that I could ultimately glue into the poor man's hands.

Getting to work

I chose the rightmost binoculars-wielding guy from the box art as my transfer to the Kriegsmarine. All I changed was his hat from the field cap to the officer's fancy hat. That may require some poking later on (I had this idea that the naval officer's hats in Das Boot were a bit less pointy than the Wehrmacht ones), but it could also look good with just the proper colours.

Käytin siis suoraan takakannen "rakennusohjeen" merkitsemät palat, joista tuo takki oli ehkä omituisin kokonaisuus. Ovelasti, mutta itselleni täysin turhasti, kaverin lahkeet saisi maalattua täysin ja nätisti takinhelman altakin. Liimasin äijälle jalat kiinni torsoon ja takin selkäosan heti perään. Kevyen koesovittelun perusteella takki olisi aika hyvin sopiva, jos kohta lievää saumakittailua edellyttävä. Ehkä minä malttaisin hoitaa ne kuntoon parempaa lopputulosta jahdatessani.

At this point I kept the arms off the torso just to keep their final position open. And this way they wouldn't be on the way if I started working on the front side of the coat. According to what I found out with a quick googling the naval raincoats were a bit different than this one and I wouldn't have any need for the belt going across the chest. I was beginning to think that this wasn't going to be just as quick a project as I had thought in my delusions of grandeur...

No matter, there have to be challenges. I still thought that as I'm a total amateur, the Project Mumblings wasn't even going to aim at perfection but something acceptably cool.

Finished: Project V/16

Darth Vader's TIE fighter

Or, as it's more familiar to everyone: Sienar Fleet Systems' TIE Advanced x1 prototype. However you have approached this starfighter, it was all the same and now it was finished. Fun and easy, as long as we choose to ignore the first step.

I ultimately misused my much-suffered TIE/ln by almost recreating the moment when Darth Vader arrived to the Death Star's trench with his wingmen. The trench was something I didn't try to fold out of paper, even though the mad idea did pass through my sick, poor mind.

"I have you now"

On the Sienar assembly line

Starting from the worst

As we're talking about a TIE series fighter, the build obviously begins with the command pod. This time I was prepared for the wing pylon attachment being a horrendous process to say the least. With this knowledge I left all the preparations (pre-bending the front and back lips of the lobes) and started swearing the pylons onto the pod's sides.

After over half an hour of sweaty fighting I had both of the bits properly and firmly attached. They really required pushing and pressing with astonishing force, just to get the lips and holes even remotely aligned. There were quite a few moments when I was absolutely certain that the tangerine lobe -like bits of the command pod would just snap any moment, thanks to the forceful pressing and bending. In the end the setup survived and the pieces got attached correctly.

On the downhill of th edifficult ramp

Sealing the pod's front and back parts with the canopy (and the rear thing) was the next and second most awful part of this build. Now these stages were a bit more difficult than with the TIE/ln, as the wing pylons held the pod tightly in shape. Still, as a work phase this was ridiculously much more enjoyablethan the first one.

After this I attached the hexagonal wing support bits into the ends of the wing pylons, fun and easy. Now I'd just need to get them nicely attached to the wings themselves...

Surprisingly the next step was to jump to the coffin-shaped base. On the base went the hamburger-like rear hull that then got a pair of low wing supporting boxes.Again, very quick and easy.

How in the Empire...?

Finally (surprisingly late) I was instructed to smash the command pod structure between the rear hull's pincers. I'd done it a bit differently: first attach one of the boxes, then install the pod and finally seal the setup with the second box. But no, now I had to twist and bend the wing attachment bits to get the pod installed with scary amount of force (again). Finally the hexagonal boxes had to be attached to the wing boxes. I have to admit that I was slightly surprised when none of the lips didn't break or get bent useless.

Finally I needed a couple of funnels in front of the hexboxes and then I got to attach the iconic wings themselves. At this point, for some totally mindbending reason, one of the twin Blaster Cannons fell off, even though I had been absolutely sure of them being tightly and surely attached. Grumble.

Done

The TIE/A x1 proto ended up looking pretty nice, even if I say so myself. I didn't even leave awful fingerprints on anything. The last photo of this set has a 50c coin to provide some scale to this silliness.

Project V/16

This Metal Earth Models kit that had jumped into the shopping basked during the easter vacation also jumped into the top of the Project Mumblings' work queue. Now I'd be assembling Darth Vader's TIE Fighter - or more familiarly to everyone - a TIE Advanced x1 prototype. While skimming through the instructions and the piece sheets it looked like a rather simple build, if we ignored the spherical pod with its wing pylons that caused my few hairs to get even greyer during the TIE/ln project.

Finished: IV/16

A last-minute change of mind

My project assistant had already been picking decals and their places, when suddendly she decided that we wouldn't use them after all. All the same to me, the artist (and owner and payer) decides. To finish the project up I glued on the three missing canopy pieces (to my question "a straight or a bubble canopy" I was of course immediately answered "bubble!"). The Spitfire was finished as soon as the glue cured.

Supermarine Spitfire mk V C

The result was, as expected, pretty colourful. Just like the Challenger it would've been easy to conceal in an autumny forest. We'll see if my assistant has interest for a third model. Time will tell. Sooner or later, time will tell.

Improving the summery office - microproject's revenge

Surprise!

Pressured by my coworkers and my own slightly disturbed mind I ended up doing what was expected. I decided to get back to modifying my desk fan a bit further. I left the blade bit to the office and carried to so far untouched parts home to be worked on.

Excesses off and off to work

First off I removed the molded-on plastic rear grille with side cutters. Luckily the plastic was weak and didn't fight me one bit. The remaining stubs I cut off with the xacto and then I sanded the whole device thoroughly. At this point the device looked quite silly... but a bit of paint would hopefully fix it all.

One of my coworkers had suggested that I'd glue all sorts of greeblies to make it look more engine-like. I did consider that but after a bit of thousand-box browsage I realized that I mostly had just styrene sheets, track links and sprockets. Also, I didn't quite trust in my scratchbuilding skills at all.

Paintage

Working very eagerly I forgot to take any work in progress photos, so you have to tolerate my explanations instead. To begin with I taped the motor box's holes shut, not pondering if I needed to or not. Again I used a grey primer so that I could see if I missed anything on the white plastic. After the airbrushing was done I removed the masks and applied the primer on the remaining bits with a paintbrush.

When all this was done I selected a couple of paint bottles and I guess pretty guessably took the Luftwaffe approach with its RLM colours. In other words, I was going for something like my previous Fw-190 project.

The only thing that was crystal clear in my head even before I started anything, was that I wanted this thing to have a yellow Eastern Front kind of chin. So I masked an area on the lower front and started airbrushing some medium yellow to cover it. I had to apply a number of layers for a decent coverage.

A Luftwaffe pattern

The base part I painted completely with a lighter grey, just like the underside of a plane. Most of the engine bit I painted with the darker grey but left an obscure area for the grey violet, mostly on the top. These I airbrushed this way and that way, with broad strokes and not stressing too much about the evenness of the coverage. With the darker grey I did some attempt at mottling on the top edge of the base. Of course I forgot to do the same with lighter grey on the bottom of the top block.

Later on I fixed the thinnest parts of the paintjob with a paintbrush and did all the painting on the front and back sides that were kept untouched because of all the holes. This was quicker and easier than recovering or plugging the holes, as I would still have had to fix them manually in the end.

Finally I dabbed the edges of the camo pattern with a sponge bit, as they were a bit too hard-edged to my liking. Then I also did the forgotten mottling on the bottom of the main piece. At last.

The dials and knobs

At this point I masked off the surroundings of the speed dial, as soon as things were dry. Then I airbrushed it black as well as the tilt-lock knob. I was pondering if I should paint some indicators, rotation arrows and open/close -texts and such.

Anyhow, I drybrushed both these pretty heavily with gunmetal and while I was at it did some more drybrushing here and there. I attempted to leave the overall feeling on the cleaner side of the spectrum as in this scale excesive bumping might look a bit weird. To wrap this up I washed the whole top module with brown. After the drying time was suffered through I matt varnished the device.

Detail work

The original markings on the speed dial 0 - 1 - 2 were just boring. With a coworker we thought that they could be renamed. After a short but uninhibited brainstorming session we ended up with "Aus - Achtung - Gefahr". Pretty soon I had to admit that there just wasn't enough space for everything, so something like "Aus - Ein - Achtung" could be crammed in readably. Being the funny guy I am I came up with the idea that instead of a warning an outright denial ("Verboten") would be even more amusing, so I declared that the fan would be either on or off - the strongest blow was forbidden as dangerous. Or something.

Of course my Germanizied fan needed a proper name. Google's translator tried to suggest something as mundane as Fan and that wasn't fun at all. I mangled the words of the language of love a bit to get what I wanted. Just as I read that the fan's diameter was six inches, or 152mm in human measurements, the idea became very clear. This would be called the 152mm air through-blowing device, model 2016. As I already admitted, with a bit of violence and word-mangling I ended up with 152Luftdurchblasengerät16 and was most pleased with that.

To make the labeling part as easy for me as possible I printed out the necessary words with a properly gothic font (I found this from somewhere: Canterbury). It was readable, sufficiently gothic but still too complicated to by cut open into masks, so I did manually what I could. I was told it was readable. After this was done and the paint dry I applied a matt varnish layer to protect my precious texts.

Photos

Before I rereinstalled the blades I took a couple of "this is how it ended up" - photos. If someone was wondering the base's bottom being yellow, I can say that I once pondered painting the caution stripes on it but then came to my senses as that stuff wouldn't have fit this project at all. Now it brought the rear-airfame's yellow band to mind. Or at least that's what I hoped you thought of.

As assumed, the propeller hid most of the front side's details. But the point was that they were there, they were done, even if no one ever saw or noticed them.

Just to show how things differ I took one of the untouched Matsui fans next to mine to show where we started from. The difference was noticeable and in my non-neutral opinion the difference is in my fan's favour ;)

Materials used

* VSP Grey Primer
* VMA 71002 Medium Yellow
* VMA 71103 Grey RLM84
* VMA 71054 Dark Grey Blue
* VMA 71128 Grey Violet
* VMA 71046 Pale Blue Grey
* VMA 71057 Black
* VMA 71065 Steel
* VMC 70863 Gunmetal Grey
* VMA 71001 White
* VMW 765135 Brown
* 70520 Matt Varnish

Another very custom paintjob

I unleashed my Project assistant as soon as the model was ready to be painted. The chosen palette was familiar from the previous one: red/blue/green/orange, except that this time she asked to get some kind of a metal shade (VMA 71064 Chrome). On the first session she painted the bottom and some of the sides. Then, only one and half months she finished with the rest. Luckily we were in no hurry at all.

Early May

Late June

The resultset

The sweet mix of chrome and the other shades made this plane quite unorthodox. While looking at the bottom you could expect it to be the plane of half-red baron or something equally weird. But as I have said before and will keep saying, the main thing was that the artist herself was content with her doings.