From The Archives

Old photographs from my modeling archive:

A scratchbuilt model of a Japanese Baka rocket-propelled suicide bomb, shown here moving out with considerable delta-vee (well, considerable delta-vee for an A engine, anyway). It flew pretty well, but it took so much weight in the nose to keep the CG ahead of the CP it came down like a brick and destroyed its parachute every time. This whole dry lake area is now a housing development, and the home-made launch pad was in the toolbox of my truck when someone stole my truck out of the parking lot at work. Grrrr.

The Screamin' Pinhead. Big model, but paradoxically easy and fun to paint. It came with the Altar of Souls and two puzzle boxes. I added chains and actual fishing hooks to one of the puzzle boxes, with super glue used to stiffen the chain and made it stand straight. This is almost all craft store acrylic paint, by the way, as enamels seem never to fully cure when applied to vinyl.

DML's 1/35th scale North Vietnamese Army set. I like painting these things and plopping them on a common case, even if the setting makes no particular sense. I wish I had known about horse hair before I did this; it's much easier to work with than the stuff shown here, grass from Woodland Scenics.

Tamiya 37mm FLAK-37 and "German Infantry At Rest" in a revetment made out of Celluclay, painted sawdust, and a whole lot of strip basswood, origin uncertain (I tend to buy bags of scale wood whenever I come across it, but I can't begin to remember the brand name, or where I bought it). This was my one experiment with Gunze Sanyo paint; they offered "field grey" and I thought I'd give it a try, but it's very glossy and I had no luck achieving any kind of respectably flat sheen. I later discovered that Delta makes an acrylic craft paint called "Hammered Iron" that is a dead ringer for field grey, and it's flat, and it's easier to use. There's a fourth guy, sitting in the corner of the revetment on the far right; you can just barely see a scrap of his helmet and the toe of one boot. Also note that they have a frying pan, but no stove... Hmmm....

Secondary Projects

I usually have several secondary projects going while I work on more serious things. It keeps me from getting stuck - when I run out of the gumption required to work on a serious project, I can work on something secondary instead of going inside to eat Cheetos and watch TV. Not that I eat Cheetos very often; that Orange Hand of Doom thing gets to me. (I sometimes have nightmares of picking up a partially completed model while both hands are completely covered with orange Cheetos-substance.)

Here are a couple of secondary things I've been tinkering with on and off while waiting for bright ideas on bigger projects. I don't think of myself as a figure painter by any means, but I kind of like painting them, at least as long as there aren't 34 of them to do at one time...

DML's 1/35th scale 88mm "Puppchen" antitank rocket launcher and crew. Nice kit, mediocre execution of same. Years ago I bought a stack of hexagonal styrofoam pieces designed to serve as terrain in tabletop wargaming (Micro-Armor in specific, as I recall). I never did really do much tabletop wargaming (not because I didn't want to, but because opponents were hard to find). These days I use them as bases for things of this sort. The snow is just Celluclay painted white a bunch of times, and the stuff that's supposed to look like dead winter grass poking up is mane hair snipped from one of my wife's horses. The kit contained no small arms, so I threw in a couple of MP-40s and a Panzerfaust from a generic Tamiya German weapons set.

I think this is a Verlinden figure, a 120mm figure of a soldier from the US 101st Airborne Division in Iraq. It's been in work for a while and the package is long gone, so I'm only guessing that it's Verlinden. The paper towel backdrop may be extra-absorbent, but it's also extra-cheesy.

New Ware Last Men on the Moon

Here is New Ware's 1/24th scale vignette of Gene Cernan (with the red stripes) and Jack Schmitt (sans red stripes) prospecting on the surface of the moon. Everything you see here comes in the kit, except for a few pieces of wire that I snipped out of the innards of a defunct radio. Each astronaut consists of a mere handful of parts - a main body including boots and gloves, a separate helmet, a separate backpack, two sample bags, and a camera. The casting was quite good. Note the shaft of the scoop in Schmitt's hand. That's a resin casting, not a piece of wire, and that attests to the quality of the casting, the relatively supple nature of the resin, and the restrained nature of the pour plug.

.

This was one of the first models I finished after my heart attack and surgery, and I chose it because it was easy to work on in bed. The mold parting lines didn't require a lot of work, there wasn't a whole lot of assembly, and the pour plugs were not difficult to deal with and didn't require heavy machining.

.

Painting, on the other hand... After assembling the figures all the way (except for the scoop) I sprayed them with eight or ten coats of hardware store flat white paint, which helped to fill in the few tiny holes and tooling marks I found on the figures. It also accounted for about 90% of the painting, since the astronauts are, as a first approximation, entirely white. As a second approximation, they're almost entirely white. I used acrylic paints for the recognition bands, connectors, gloves, boots and Velcro bits, and stainless steel metalizer for the camera cases. Then it was time to shadow the figures, which I did by mixing up a wash of Testor's Engine Grey and basically dunking the figures. I find white very hard to shadow. I always end up turning the white highlights into dull grey, and these figures are no exceptions. They are more grey than they should be and they don't "pop" like the astronauts in full sunlight did in photographs, but in this case I think I prefer the overly grey appearance because it shows off the detail in the suits better than a whiter and more monochromatic finish would have. Rather than paint the helmet visors gold or black, I tried to paint reflections of the sky and lunar surface onto the curved surfaces, and then covered them with several coats of Future to give them a gloss sheen. I'll leave it to viewers to determine how well I did.

.

I painted the base with Tamiya "deck tan" acrylic and subjected it to a heavy wash of the same Engine Grey color (using a different color might have made the figures and the base appear to be lit by different light sources) and then after it dried I scrubbed the base with various tan, brown, black, orange and iron oxide red pastels. I use heavy white-bristled brushes for this sort of work and usually don't have to scrape or sand the pastel sticks; the brush does a good job of removing the material. I tried to produce an uneven blob of patchy oranish soil around their feet to simulate the volcanic glass beads that the astronauts found in real life, though overcoating with Dullcote took some of the brightness off of my orange patch. While I was at it I brushed pastels on the the astronauts' legs, boots and gloves. The last construction step was assembling and painting the scoop stainless steel, and then gluing it into Schmitt's hand.

.

The decals were comprehensive, very well printed, thin, responsive to Micro-Sol, and tiny. So tiny that I lost a few in what amounts to thin air. I plucked them off the decal backing sheet with the tip of a #11 knife blade, but then they simply vanished. Fortunately New Ware provides two identical decal sheets so there were spares, though to be honest I didn't put on all the decals on the front of the PLSS backbacks, and I never did figure out from the instructions where decal #15 (a fairly large stencil) goes.

.

All in all, I was quite pleased with this kit. On the good side, it featured easy assembly, good fit, modest pour stubs, flexible resin, very few pinholes, good surface detail, a nice base, excellent decals, and good instructions as far as they went. I could have used more comprehensive decal placement instructions, myself. But on the whole, very well done and a hoot to build.

More Romans!

More Romans, in this case, a pair of 54mm Andreas Romans sold as a set, complete with the rocky hilltop base. I quite like Andreas figures; I find them nicely detailed and well-sculpted, and like most white metal figures, there wasn't a lot of cleanup to do. They were painted for the most part with "craft paint", though I did use enamel washes and good old Testor's Chrome Silver here and there. The hardest part was painting the insignia on the scutum; well, that and not bending the pilum.

I Have No Idea What It Is

I have no idea what this is supposed to be. I bought it in a "make offer" bargain bin from a game shop that was going out of business. It's 25mm, and it's from Citadel, but that's all I remember. It's some kind of science-ficiton cannon and two guys in vaguely Russian uniforms, but past that, your guess is as good as mine. (I say "vaguely Russian" because they look very Russian but have skulls where one would expect red stars.)

Probably the main comment I wanted to make was the base. The large rocks are pieces of decorative redwood bark, the groundwork itself is a mixture of Durham's water putty and kitty litter, and the base itself is a plastic lid from a jar of mixed nuts. The vegetation is dead stuff I found out in the yard. God knows what it is, except for dead.