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.

Saturday Workbench 18 March 2023

 

OK, so it's actually Sunday here in the UK but it is still Saturday to the West! Tomorrow is the final day of the Challenge, and I'm frantically trying to finish things off in time to get everything photographed and the post written before the deadline.

Today has mostly been cutting up the decals I've made, gloss varnishing the Type S ready for adding decals, painting and gloss varnishing the backdrop pieces, priming and base-coating 1/270 and 1/1000 versions of the Type S (I thought that if I do have time to get them finished, they'd make a great addition to the post - I'll just have to see how things go tomorrow), painting up some snack and drinks machines for the backdrop and adding decals to everything that needs them.

Speaking of the decals, they've been an absolute nightmare. First off, when I went to print them, my inkjet printer wouldn't output black. I knew the cartridge was a bit low, but there should have been enough. Luckily I had a spare cartridge, so I put that in, hit print and...yes, not printing black. After about 30 minutes of going through the cleaning, deep cleaning and print head alignment processes, I finally managed to get it working. Of course, that was about 2am on Thursday night/Friday morning. Yesterday I hit them with gloss varnish to seal the ink in.

This evening I was adding the decals to everything. The small ones for the cargo items were (mostly) good, the ones for the Type S went on nicely. However, I had real problems with the ones for the backdrop, possibly because of the size. The 36 x 56mm ones weren't too bad, the 16 x 96mm ones were a touch tricky, but the 36 x 196mm ones...let's just say that there was a lot of swearing. Luckily I had made sure to print extras of each, which was all well and good until I accidentally picked up one of the boards to move it after applying a top coat of MicroSet, and of course my thumb just happened to land right on top of the softened decal, pulling it up as I removed my thumb. And no spares remaining! I've printed another sheet and varnished them. I'll have to apply that one tomorrow.

Tomorrow (today, I guess) will see me doing lots of varnishing, some touching up around the edges of decals on the ship, some weathering, some more varnishing, photography, photo resizing and then writing a rather long blog post for the submission.

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 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.

Wednesday Workbench 15 February 2023

 

Over the past couple of days I've been painting a few figures for my Friday submission - they're finished and the post is waiting in the queue to be dealt with. 

Today saw me begin work on some of the interior pieces for the Type S Scout. I decided to start with the partitions and bulkheads, which all received their main colour by airbrush. As one was the upper engineering section which combined the walls and floor in one piece, I decided to do all the engineering floors - the floors and doors of the different sections will all be in different colours (engineering = red, crew accommodations = green; bridge = blue; other areas = blue-grey).

This evening I've done a test piece, using one of the cabin partitions. I'm not happy with that green, and I'm not keen on the copper band on the walls; I think I'll use a different green and do the band in that colour as well. I suspect that the blue I was going to use will have the same problem

Wednesday Workbench 08 February 2023

 

Well, it might be Thursday now in the UK, but it's still Wednesday in places West of here! The reason for posting so late is that my laptop decided to throw a wobbly and stop responding earlier this evening. It was fine when I popped to the kitchen to start cooking my dinner, but when I returned a few minutes later the screen was black with a message "No Bootable Device Found". After several unfruitful attempts to restart it, I gave up and dragged my old laptop out of storage, then spent a few hours getting it up and running (mostly transferring files from my backup drive) so that I can at least communicate and do things until either my current laptop is fixed or I have a replacement - I'll be taking a trip to Currys PC World tomorrow for that.

So, what's on the workbench? As you might be able to guess, I have finally got around to priming the Type S Scout Courier. It's taken me four days so far and I've probably got one more day to go.

Why am I priming it now? Quite simply because the item I painted over the weekend (and which will be up on the Challenge blog on Friday) completes my tour of the studios and will give me entry to the Director's Chair studio - I've already agreed with Curt that my task will be to get this fully painted.