"Nothin' but the rain."

As promised, the beauty shots of the Viper build. No photoshop trickery with the viper model itself, just a composite onto a suitable background.

I think it rather looks the part, don't you?

As one door closes...

So the viper is done. Just the beauty shots to do:

While waiting for the Klear coat to dry I was also able to finish off the Carnosaur:

I'll do a summary post on that with a collection of all the process pictures on the next couple of days. 

And finally I stuck together this little laughing chap: 

So he's up next as I start on the Cylon Raider. 

If I don't get anywhere with that before let me wish everyone a happy new year!

So Say We All

MERRY CHRISTMAS EVERYONE!

Nearly done with the Viper. There's just a final clear coat and then weathering to do. The Christmas haul this month was more models than gaming or miniatures as I'm going to try and whittle down the lead pile this year a bit rather than adding to it.

Hopefully normal painting updates will be resumed in a few days as the Carnosaur is finally nearing completion.

The painting of the Viper was fairly simple airbrushing. I decided to paint the stripes as it would make it easier to weather them. After masking off the strips I added maskol - you can see it on the pictures as purple dots - which is simply liquid latex. After the painting, just rub the maskol off and voila! instant wearing.

Did some gross weathering at this stage by sanding the paintwork back down to the grey primer.

Decals added:

Next project beyond a couple of 28mm miniatures:

Fill Er Up

One of the banes of any model kit is filling seams or joins. No matter how well engineered the kit, once a ham-fisted gorilla like me gets their hands on it there will be a visible join. 

Always before I've used car filler which had the virtue of being cheap but can't really be applied to miniatures. 

Now I've found something that can. 

This is Vallejo putty. It's basically plastic in a load of poly cement. All you do it squeeze it out

Smooth it down

And then sand it. 

This is will work on large plastic miniatures as well; it will also be a lot cheaper than greenstuff, I think. It's also got some fairly

Obvious possibilities for terrain and dioramas.  Next set of plastic miniatures or conversions I use I'll give it a try and report back. 

All of this has happened before...

...and all of this has happened again. 

Made a lot of progress on the Viper. First, I built a very simple circuit with five LEDs in parallel; two for the cockpit and 3 for the engines. 

Next - and an often overlooked step - is to paint the inside of the hull with black paint for lightblocking. I also glued some foil in to make sure. 

Next I installed the cockpit and the start of the wiring loom:

And a test of the cockpit lighting:

Next step is putting together the rest of the hull and arranging the engine lights:

And, as you can see, the overall shape is starting to look rather familiar. 

Hopefully I'll be able to get it primed and start airbrushing next week. 

I also discovered a new little thing which has definite possibilities if applied to miniatures: I'll pop a product review up tomorrow. 

ADHD

It turns out that lighting a model with fibre optic is a very tedious process, so I got on with a few bits and pieces at the same time. 

So, here is the viper cockpit painted and done with all fibre in place. 

And here's the lighting test. 

You can't really see but the fibre ends have been tinted with inks. 

And while all that palaver was going on, I've been working on the Carnosaur which is about 80% done. 

Next up will be soldering the lighting circuit together for the viper so I can assemble it.