Halcyon Aliens Dropship plus APC diorama WIP

[Guest]

andrew i feel your pain mate,after all the scratch work more is needed when you thought you had cracked it ouch

mobear

[Guest]

Now to painting... First a little bit of preshading...

and now with added Olive Drab...

Bloody hell this airbrush lark is more difficult than I thought - every time I look at it I see another patch that isn't covered or very even! The Missile pods are just pushed in, not fully attached (yet).

Now the good news is that I think I can fix the missile fin problem. Last night I took my sprue-clipper to the fins and on the 4 test missiles I clipped the in in half so now it is half the height it was before. A quick stroke of a sanding stick and all seemed well. All 4 took about 10 minutes so the other 28 should only take about an hour and a bit!

[Guest]

w...o....w dont sweat it about the AB will give your uniqueness first class,also well done on fins all comes out in the wash

mobear

[mossiepilot]

Thats looking great Andrew.

Tony.

[Guest]

Good news on the fins Andrew & I wouldn't worry too much about a patchy finish - seems to me a dropship would look pretty battered & worn anyway.

Cheers

Patrick

[Guest]

Looks a better job than i would make with an airbrush mate, i've used them in the past for groovey car graphics etc but getting a level coat on a model is beyond me

[Guest]

the paint job looks good mate it is a drop ship after all, being dropped from space through a planets atmosphere it would look worn and faded.

Scott

[papa 695]

Great work Andrew looking fantastic and like the rest have said the paint job looks spot on and good work on the fins

[Guest]

Well, I feel like I came THIS close to ruining the whole model the last two days! As you saw before I'd AB Olive Drab all over. Then I went back and picked out a few details such as the silver on the landing gear legs and so on. I did a little bit of weathering, particularly on some of the leading edged to give them a sort of streaked look as though they've taken punishment on re-entry. Then I took it into my idiotic brain that I needed to give it several Klear coats. I don't really know what I was thinking apart from I wasn't!

Anyway several clear coats and a bit of sanding down later I then realised I'd forgotten to paint the various stripes and grey panels that the instrucitons show, around the rear engine intakes, along the leading edges of the big fins and so on. Its bloody annoying. So then I masked these areas up and brush painted using Field Grey XF 65. Of course when the masking tape came off there was lots of paint creep, so thats had to be touched up OVER the top of the Klear... grrrr

Anyway, this is what its looking like currently after its received it grey stripes

Had an issue with the right rear engine plate - as I was painting the whole plate popped inwards into the body of the model! it was a case of shake rattle and roll to get it back in view and some deftly manipulated tweezers and some fast superglue to get it back in place.

There was also some triumph plus disapointment when the canopy masks came off. Triumph that they came off nicely and produced a nice framing effect, disapointment in that I discovered that at some point during the constrcutions, some shavings or flakes of plastic had found their way into the cockpit and were electrostatically attached to the inside of the cockpit canopy. You can see them in the lower pilot window in this photo:

Apart from that the view into the cockpit looks pretty good. The headlamp masks also came off and look pretty good after a little sanding down with the sand stick to smooth out the paint ridge around the mask. Now I wonder if anyone can spot the - ahem "deliberate" mistake?

[Guest]

Things have been progressing apace! We're on the home straight now with the finish line in sight!

Well it seems nobody spotted my "deliberate" mistake... Take a look at the lower edge of the widscreen at the front and compare it with this screencap...

Yup, I missed out the triangular panel in the lower left where the "01" is stencilled. Well that had to be added after the photos were taken. The next job, after the Klear was thoroughly cured was of course the decal. Now anyone who has ever touched this kit will tell you that they are painful. The large stencilled bands have solid decal film infill, so my solution was to eliminate that as much as possible as you can see here from the beginning of the job...

Well it turned out to be the right thing to do as it meant the decals went down a lot easier. Okay it did mean there were difficulties as I was dealing with thin lines and shapes which had a very annoying habit of stickign more to each other than the model. I also had a problem in that with the age of the backing paper, when the stencil came free, it usually pulled a thin layer of backing paper with it. The solution to that was to seperate the decal from the paper under water, then immediately flip the decal over and scrub the underside with a small paintbrush to clean it. It did mean that all trace of decal film glue was lost, but Micro sol and set came to the rescue there. I only really had a few breakages and only the grey shapes caused any major problem as they completely broke up as I was applying them. In the end I just stripped them off and left it alone. I thought about masking and painting them on, but in the end I just left them off as I wasn't going to risk ruining things this late in the day.

So now she's all decalled up and had another coat of Klear over the top of the decals. The folding undercarriage doors have been decalled too and now attached to the underside, as has the refuelling probe and the fin just in front of the cockpit canopy and currently the model is now drying in the other room having had matt varnish sprayed

What you expected pictures? Patience is a virtue!

Now the other BIG job was those sodding missiles. I had 32 missiles which had oversized fins and were too long to fit in the pods. So out came the sprue cutters and the scalpel and sanding stick, fortified myself with a cup of tea and while listening to Pick of the Pops this afternoon this surgery got performed 32 times...

Since then they've all been repainted in white and some trial fitting done on the pods. All is looking well for the final fitting, probably tomorrow after the varnish has set on the otehr parts of the model. I'm not sure if I'll permanently glue the pods on - the fittings I've made are tight enough so that they stay in place at the moment without glue. I am tempted to leave them detachable for now while it gets transported around club meeings and shows and will permanently fix only when things have settled down or the joints get too loose.

I plan to take this to IPMS Farnborough next week, plus the Smallspace show in July and maybe some other shows during the year.

Today is the day when I finally saw all the pieces of the diorama working together for the first time... mmm, nice!

[Guest]

Keep up the good work Andrew looking good so far.

scott

[Guest]

Thanks Scott

As I said in the last post, yesterday was the first time I got to see the diorama for real and although it looked good, there was something missing... It was a bit too empty, so today I knocked up a little extra for the landing pad...

This uses a couple of plastic tubes that I got when flying back from USA a couple of years ago - they are the holders for traveller toothbrushes Along with some plastic pipe, balsa, bits that were cut out of the missile pods and some of the bits left over from PE for the the cockpit , its a nice way to clean up some of the scrap that was left behind

[Guest]

Andrew its really looking great! I usually spray a very light coat of clear over the tape edges before applying color to keep the color creep down to a minimum.

[Guest]

your imagination has no bounderies or limits,that is a great way to clean your work area lol,first class mate

mobear

[Guest]

Just caught up on this ... i'm still impressed !!!

The quality of work never drops Andrew ...

You say you're going to get this ready to take to a show next week?? ...well to quote Vasquez ..

"Whatever you're gonna do, do it fast!"