Wednesday Workbench 31 May 2023 (aka 27 Days Later)

 Oh dear. It seems that I dropped away from posting for much longer than I should have done. Sorry about that.

I haven't picked up a paint brush since finishing that pair of Fatties, as I've been doing a lot of test printing for Kathy Millatt's kickstarter campaign. I've also been doing a lot of design work for the Peach Trees terrain. I think I've now got the atrium walkways as good as I can get them now - I just need to adjust the positioning of the OpenLock clip holes and make some minor changes to the corner pillars. I've also test-printed enough sections to do three levels of one side:

I noticed that without the apartments behind them, the walkways sagged a bit so I quickly designed some support columns to hold them for these photos. As it is 1m (40 inches, actually) wide I found that the only space where I could actually take the photos was on my kitchen floor, so the lighting isn't as good as it could be.

A lot of research (and trial and error) has gone into these - finding images online, realising that there aren't as many showing what I need as I'd like and then capturing screen-shots from the film to get more images.

For the atrium corner sections, I think I might make sense to do them as 8" x 8" tiles (8" x 9" for the ones where the parapet sticks out beyond the pillar).

The next stage of this project will be to design the apartments, shops and other bits that are needed. The first stage of that will be to create the repeated elements like wall lights, entry-phones and such.

AHPC XIII - 15th (And Final) Submission

 

As predicted, this submission took me very close to the wire yesterday - it was just before midnight that I finished writing the post, six hours before the deadline. If I hadn't stayed up working through Saturday night I wouldn't have got it done in time. Of course, if I hadn't spent so much time working on that backdrop then I wouldn't have been in such a rush at the end.

Full post here

Backdrop

Cargo

Figures

Small Scale Ships

Spirit of Camberwell

As you can see, I went a bit overboard with the weathering. I started off just trying to obscure the white edges of the decals and maybe add a couple of damage chips, but realised that some of my sponge dabs were a bit too large and heavy. So, I needed to add lots of smaller, lighter dabs to obscure the heavy ones. Then I tried softening them with a thin airbrush coat of the orange base colour and airbrushed streaks with a dark brown...

...and completely forgot to do any weathering on the landing gear!

Still it doesn't look as bad as I thought, and at least the orange isn't quite so lurid now. Mind you, I could probably have got that with just the dark brown streaking.

Thursday Workbench 16 March 2023

 

I just realised that I'd completely forgotten to do my Wednesday Workbench post last night - better late than never!

I've finished painting the 3D printed figures you saw the other day, and they're varnished and stuck on acrylic bases (well, not the sitting and relaxing figures). On the workbench right now are a few whimsical bits that might become part of the story. At the time the photo was taken, they were waiting for the first round of washes. They've just had a second round, which completes the painting - I'll be varnishing them later on.

I'm still working on the backdrop boards. The 3D printed panels have been glued onto the wall boards; I'll be gluing on the extra bits this afternoon/evening. I'm just over halfway done on the floor board - I've still got two more print runs of floor panels to go; it should be ready for priming and painting tomorrow.

Monday Workbench 13 March 2023

 

I've started painting up bits to accompany the Type S. Yesterday I painted a bunch of small cargo items and gloss coated them this morning. I'll be adding decals to them later this week once I've (2D!!)printed and prepped them.

This afternoon I began work on painting up a few 3D printed figures. As of taking the photos, they have all been base-coated; I'll be doing highlights over the next couple of days.

There are six figures in 4 poses each, plus three individual figures. I've limited the colour palette as much as possible to help speed the painting up.

At the moment, I'm not quite halfway through printing some bits (wall and floor panels) for a photo backdrop for the figures. The wall plates will be going behind the items shown above (NB - positions of some of those bits will be different on the final piece and some may be omitted).

Wednesday Workbench 08 March 2023

 

The photo above was taken a couple of hours ago and I've since made a very good start on all of the figures. These are for the World Cinema and Historical Drama studios.

Last week I 3D printed a fairly big collection of figures to accompany the Type S. Not all of them will get used, but I wanted to have the options. I've recently come across a technique using Mod Podge for gap filling, and thought it would probably also help to fill in the layer lines on 3D printed stuff. 

Yesterday I zenithal primed roughly half of the figures; I then gave all of the figures a coat of Mod Podge and left them overnight. Today I did another round of black/grey zenithal priming on all of the figures to see whether another coat of Mod Podge was needed - it was, so I did that, left the figures for an hour or so and then did another round of black/grey zenithal priming. It seems as though two coats of Mod Podge ws enough to smooth out most of the layer lines, so I then added a final zenithal of white.

I remembered that I'd previously zenithal primed an identical figure to one of the ones in this group, which was convenient as it allowed me to compare the with/without Mod Podge:

Mod Podge; no Mod Podge

Speaking of the Type S, I've finished all of the painting now which just leaves decals and weathering of the exterior. Given its current state, you won't see any photos until it's been submitted and published.

Wednesday Workbench 01 March 2023

 

And so it begins...I've started work on the hull of the Type S. The upper side has been airbrushed orange and varnished (the varnishing mainly as protection against masking tape which I'll be using in later steps. 

Having discovered that the gloss coat I applied caused the brush-pen panel lines to run, after cleaning that up I gave it a coat of matt varnish before redoing the gloss. With that lesson learned, I gave the underside a coat of matt varnish to seal in the panel lines. I'll be airbrushing it orange tomorrow.

After the exterior base coat is painted I'll be moving on to the interiors - for that I will probably break the ship down into sections or individual parts as that should be easier, especially for painting the details.

Here are some photos of the finished interior pieces and the aft cap:

Wednesday Workbench 22 February 2023

 

Since last Wednesday, I've mostly been painting up the removable interior pieces for the Type S Scout ship: 

I've got one more board of them to do:

Once all of them are done, I'll be able to move onto doing the interiors of the hull pieces, then when those are done I can paint the exterior.

However, I decided to take today and tomorrow off from that work to paint some entries for this week. I've got one figure done today, and now I've made a start on painting this bust:

Since taking that photo I have actually got most of the initial layers done - just the zip, chain, lower edge of the visor and the pedestal to go. Tomorrow I'll be doing those and then shading and highlighting the various bits. If I'm lucky, I'll be able to get the varnishing done as well, but that might end up being done on Friday.