One night I was watching an old Mystery Science Theater 3000 rerun and fiddling with a random piece of hardwood when it suddenly struck me that the piece of wood had pretty close to the same proportions as the monolith from 2001. I had an Airfix Astronaut set in my collection, the flexible vinyl guys that bear the mysterious scale of "HO/OO", and suddenly the idea of combining my piece of wood with a couple of Airfix astronauts occurred to me.
The first order of business was sealing and sanding the wood until it was quite smooth, and then covering it with six or eight coats of flat black paint. I then used a car model paint polishing kit to slowly smooth out the flat black paint. I wanted the monolith to be extremely smooth but not mirror-polished, so I stopped at one of the middling grades of polishing cloth when the monolith became smooth but not reflective.
At that point it was easy to make a small base out of a scrap of basswood, covered with Durham's worked into "lunar-like features" and sprinked with a variety of small stones sifted out of the dirt in my front yard. I painted up a couple of Apollo astronauts (easy enough - white suits, blue and red connector details, gold visors, metallic highlights on their implements, and a couple of tiny US flags taken from a Verlinden 1/35th scale US uniform decal sheet). And that was that.
Tycho Base, do you copy, over?
No comments:
Post a Comment