Finished Black Widow

Done.  More or less.  I'm not too excited about the kit-supplied base, because it makes it seem like she's off to visit the doctor.  And I swear I put the right boots on the right legs, but they still look like they're on backwards.

The paint is mostly Testors flat black, Testors metallic grey metalizer, and some anonymous dark grey acrylic (the label fell off the bottle, so I don't know what it is).  For the flesh, I generally prime with white spray paint of some sort, then apply a base coat of Delta "AC Flesh", and then apply selective washes of Testors rust.  For the hair, I applied base coat of very dark brown (Testors rubber) and then did a whole lot of drybrushing with various shades of craft paint.  The boots and eyes got a coat of Future floor wax (yes, I know, in the magazines they call it something like "Pledge with Future Shine", but to me, it's Future floor wax.  Period).

In the movie, Black Widow has hair so red it's almost orange, which I personally am not a big fan of, so I gave her a darker reddish-auburn hair color.  Hey, it's my universe.

The FAMAS rifle didn't come with the kit.  Years ago my brother and I went to Home Depot to get some boards for his patio cover, and as we were walking across the parking lot, I saw a plastic rifle on the ground.  It turned out to be the FAMAS, made out of some kind of stiff vinyl-like material, and surprisingly well detailed.  It was probably a weapon for an action figure, perhaps a French commando, and some kid dropped it.  Sorry, kid, but it will comfort you to know I still have the FAMAS and used it to give Black Widow a little more punch in the automatic weapons department.  And I happen to like the FAMAS.  I have no idea if it's any good as a rifle, since I'm not really a firearms expert, but I think it has a groovy shape.

If I were to do this kit again (and I will; I have a second one in the pile o'kits) I'll modify the boots because I think they look pretty awkward, and I'll make a different base.  And I already have a weapon for the second version, an M203 from an old Glencoe paratrooper model.  (I read a Black Widow comic some years ago where the KGB sent a new blonde Black Widow to find and kill the old red-haired Black Widow.  Why not?)

Moebius Black Widow

Does this picture make my head look huge?

This is my not-quite-completed take on the Moebius "Black Widow" model, which unlike a lot of figures is an actual glue-together thing in styrene and not solid resin or metal.  Styrene figures get a bad rap for not having particularly crisp detailing or sculpting, and the assembly process causes gaps and seams that (some) metal and resin figures don't have.

But with that said, I quite enjoyed the Moebius "Black Widow" kit.  Reasonably easy to assemble, though  you'll need a couple of pretty serious clamps to hold the body halves together, and don't even bother trying to figure out how to salvage the pin on the right-side hair piece - the pin is pointed in the wrong direction and all you can do is cut it off.

I'll post more pictures later, when I'm fully done with the figure, but this'll do for now.

Revell's 1/40th scale (or thereabouts) Corporal missile carrier and launch stuff.  I built this model more or less on a dare.  Every now and then I go into these strange modeling phases where I buy as many kits as ever, but I don't actually build anything.  I buy kits, books, magazines, paint, and tools.  I lie in bed and think about building something.  But I never actually do build anything, and meantime the collection of unbuilt kits stored on the upper shelves of my closet grows and grows and grows...

Eventually the collection of kits started to slump.  I'd go in the closet to get fresh clothes for work, and the disturbance would cause a kit avalanche.  At one point I conceived the idea of building MiG-21MFs in every scale from 1/144 to 1/32nd, and one day all my MiG-21s rained down.  Another time the Renwal Atomic Cannon slid off the top of the pile, and it's a sufficiently husky kit it actually hurt when it landed on my foot.

I decided after that the next kit to slide off would be built, come Hell or high water.  And it just so happened that it was this kit, the Revell Corporal and launcher, that slid off.

The kit comes with the Corporal missile, the weird four-wheel-steering carrier, a launch table a la the V-2, and a selection of crewmen, including this guy, who appears to be gesticulating in disgust because the launch controller isn't working right.  The only significant molding flaw I found in the kit was massive sinkage on the figures; practically every one of them had hollow backs.

It's actually a pleasant kit to build.  It isn't going to stagger those used to modern Dragon kits with its detail or engineering, but it was actually a lot more fun than I thought it would be.  There were some tense moments getting the elevating missile cradle to mate with the chassis, because you have to get a set of gears to mesh, and the ladders on the missile cradle were somewhat troublesome.  But on the whole, it was surprisingly easy and fun to build.

I'm sort of used to the idea of the decals in old kits being horrid, but these were quite nice - thin and crisp and amenable to Micro-Sol.  The US Army stuff on the cab settled down over the access hatches quite nicely, and the Corporal itself comes with a reasonable quantity of stenciling.

I experimented with the paint.  I often use spray cans to paint monochromatic kits, especially armor models.  But most of the olive drab spray paints I've used seem very dark to me (or maybe it's just my eyesight going south; that's also possible).  So for this kit, I used a vaguely olive-drabbish color from Krylon called "Oregano".  It's a little lighter than I expected, and more like khaki than olive drab, but overall, I'm not displeased with it.  Or at least not displeased enough to repaint the whole thing.

Not bad for a dare, and now that I've actually finished something, I'm starting to have more ideas.  Why, even now, I already have two more kits in work - the old Lindberg "Yuri Gagarin" spaceship (the one with the opening hangar bay on the top) and the Moebius "Iron Man" version of Black Widow.

And there are always those MiG-21s, lurking, lurking, ever lurking...