Building a Desert

Building a diorama to display your toys in idle scenes or in the midst of battle is both fun and the result can be awesome. Then again, dioramas can take up a lot of space and expensive on materials, so I never thought I'd do more than one. I've done three ... This time I thought I'd build a desert scene. What I had in mind? Just a desert. That's it. A boring dull desert with nothing much on it. Most of my dioramas so far have been fairly busy with lots of trees that take up most of the space, leaving little room to actually display my battle scenes. So the theme of this one is "open space". A desert's good for something like that. At least, that was the start of it. Space is still the theme, but some features need to be in it to make it look good. Many ideas crossed my mind since then. The first one was a simple hill with a mine shaft. Would be easy to make. Just a few sticks to make the door frame and build a hill around it and bam! Instant terrain feature. But that was boring. The idea progressed to having the ends of a space ship sticking out of the ground. My thought process here rather surpised me. I looked at the caps of some old permanent markers. They looked like they could make bell burners for a rocket. At the scale I was working at, three of them screwed to a base would be perfect! All it needed then was to be boxed in to make the space ship fuselage. The idea was to have the end of an old crashed space ship sticking out of the ground - or a hill. Lots of other ideas sprang to mind after this, like blocks sticking out of the side housing gun turrets, or the side lying slightly open - indicating that this was a large transport ship. All sorts. So after spending so much time on the basic idea, I got to work on the core of the diorama - the terrain shell. Using a square board as a base, I taped scrunched up wads of newspaper with masking tape into the rough shape of the terrain I had in mind. In this case, a hill to one side and just slightly lumpy but otherwise mostly flat land on the other side. I have to thank the Woodland Scenics handbook for the basics on terrain building. (It's a very informative manual designed specifically to sell their products - luckily similar substitutes will do) Using a roll of plaster cloth, I created the plaster shell for the terrain by wetting and then overlapping squares of the plaster cloth down. This bit is really messy and I got to get my hands really covered in plaster by the end of it! I unfortunately accidentally deleted the mid-way pictures of the completed shell at this point. Now that I've started the build, things have changed yet again. I've now got this idea for a rather run down looking base of sorts. It started when I was cutting a sheet of styrene to make the base for the rocket burners. I etched the lines in that I wanted. Somehow it turned into a door. I coated it in metallic paint. First in stainless steel, then in aluminum. Then I burnished the paint job (as per the instructions) and it almost became a mirrored surface! It looked almost frosty. I coated it in clear gloss then applied rub-on lettering an called it "Ice Berg 13" (the numbers were from a spare Gundam Seed HCM Pro slide-on decal sheet I had lying around). Actually it was meant to be Ice Berg 09, but I damaged the slide-on letters beyond repair at that point. Now it was a door! Why Ice Berg? I thought it would be funny to have a base in the desert called Ice Berg. I put the door in place and then used modeling clay to create an extension to the hill and fix the door in place. Because the whole terrain was still damp, it shrank as it dried and left cracks in the clay. This was unintentional, but it had the benefit of looking like natural wear and erosion. I rubbed some clay into the flat terrain to make the ground a bit rougher. As I was working, another idea sprang to mind. Soda caps can make reasonable water tanks! I gathered a few and set them aside for later. The next step was to paint the terrain. Normally I dab the terrain with a brush to give it that natural uneven colour, but this time I took a different approach. I airbrushed the whole thing. Thanks to the shape of the terrain, everything turned out really well. It does look a bit redder in these photos. Almost like a Martian landscape. I might mist a coat of white mixed with desert yellow onto the terrain to lighten it a bit. While painting, I didn't mask the door. This resulted in paint being feathered onto it along the edges. This weathered it and made it look dusty. Just the effect I was after, but I lost the mostly frosty mirror look of the door. I then painted the soda bottle caps in aluminum and weathered them a little with brown. Not sure if I want to have them set out side by side or whether to stack them on top of the other to make a tall water tank. I've not attached them to the shell as of yet. When I do, a clay base will be made, they'll be superglued into place and then the clay painted. That's as far as I've reached so far. I'd like to add more features to the hill to make it look like a real structure of some sort. Chimneys, pipes (to the tanks), some windows or building projecting from the side of the hill or maybe even a windmill. Then again it could just be some eccentric's refrigerator or garage. I don't think I can mimic rusty corrugated iron, but that's the image I have in mind with this facility. What next for this diorama? Who knows - I haven't really planned that far ahead. As my goal to have a large plain area has been achieved, the fate of the rest of the diorama is all in the air. I can easily have robots standing pretty, on guard or having a fist fight in the sand. Or any other machines for that matter. The base itself is really just a backdrop. A point of interest in the background that can add colour to the scene, but is not necessarily involved. And what of the rocket ship I had in mind? Well, it'll be kept as an idea for a potential future project. Stay tuned for the completion - when I get round to it.

The years accumulated in the cupboard

I was going though some of my old junk that's accumulated in my cupboard - I need to make some space. Old newspaper clippings, airline magazines, an ancient Archie comic, high school yearbooks and a whole bundle of things from my high school days. Some old blurry photos - I was a hopeless with the camera back then. Much of this stuff dates back an entire lifetime 15 years or more - which is a lifetime when you consider that was the age I was when I gathered much of this stuff. I discovered that I'm a slave to nostalgia. I just cannot bring myself to throw most of it away. Oh, certainly my old test papers with low marks went out without a thought. Even the rest of the stuff may not have any value, now or in the future. In fact it'll probably be of little value to anyone else but me. But, I still want to hold on to them, so that I can remember. To remember back to a time where today would seem so far away. To remember the abundance of friends that I had back then that I can no longer see again now that we've grown up and gone our separate ways - and some of us have migrated to other countries since then. I know one shouldn't be held down by the past but, I think I'll pick out the ones that are most meaningful and hang onto them for a little longer. I'm a sentimental fool.

The Colouful and Wide World of Paints

Over the last year, I've been experimenting with airbrushing since acquiring a cheap second hand Tamiya Sprayworks air compressor and spray gun set that had only been used once before. It's a wonderful device but requires that you constantly clean the spray gun after using it lest the paint dries and clogs up in it. Still, the even coats with the excellent finish are well worth all the effort to keep the sophisticated device clean. Now we come to the core of my ramble: Paint. Ah, paint! A modeler's bread and butter for customising or making their models and other toys look more accurate. To weather or make their model look fresh off the assembly line. But it's also not necessarily the easiest aspect of building your toy. The type of paint you use is important. There are many types, and the two most common are enamel and acrylic. Oil and water based paints respectively. To be honest with you, I absolutely enjoy using acrylic. They're easy to work with and cleaning up so easy. Fixing errors, which usually involve stripping all the paint off, is also a breeze. Acrylic thinner and the bulk methylated spirits I use to clean my brushes and the spray gun are less pungent than the enamel thinner and turpentine that enamel paints need. However, enamel paints are well established and I must admit that they can look very good when done right. They are unfortunately (or should I say fortunately?) hard to strip off if you need to redo a coat. I've been experimenting with them lately and I've found that they work differently from acrylics. In fact, you are absolutely required to start with light colours and work down to the darks. This also means you have to prime your model in a light base colour before you start, and once you do start working with the paint, you'll need several coats to get an even opaque colour. It is possible I might be using too much thinner! I try to keep it 50%/50%, or sometimes 55% paint and 45% thinner if the coats look too watery. In addition to the two types of paint, paints can be further divided into gloss, metallic and flat. Gloss paint has a higher resin content in the paint that results in a shiny reflective surface that you can almost see your face in. Glossy paint almost doesn't need a clear coat to seal it in, but one would certainly be recommended. Glossy surfaces are also the best surface for applying decals on. Metallic paint is very similar to gloss but have metallic flakes in it that render the metalic finish. Metals differ a little and I often find they rub off very easily - which is probably why some paints recommend that you burnish the finish with a cloth when you are done to get rid of the excess. I feel they almost definitely need a clear coat to seal the paint in. Good old chrome silver, gold or copper are great base coats if you are planing to use a semi clear colour coat. Flat paints are just flat basic colours that aren't reflective once the paint has dried. Flats are probably the easiest to work with as you can tell when they are dry by the dull finish. If you recoat the paint, it will go down glossy so you can tell which parts you have or have not gone over. But that's not the end of it, if later decide that you wanted it to be glossy, all you need to do is coat it with a clear gloss coat spray. Not only will that protect the coat, it'll make it glossy. In addition to the types of paint you are working with, I've learned that the make of paint is just as important. Paint from different manufacturers will behave differently - particularly with their drying times. I've tried Humbrol and Tamiya enamel paints. Both are well fairly well established and widely used brands worldwide (at least that's the impression I get after reading some recent modeler magazines). There are most certainly other brands out there, but these are the two most accessible to me. Humbrol has a decent range of pre-mixed colours. I mean, I needed metallic pink for a particular robot model, and they had it. Fantastic! However, Humbrol paint take a very long time to dry and cure. It almost requires that I wait overnight before I can start working again. Even then, the heat off my fingers tend to leave marks in the finish - though I suspect I may have put on too heavy a coat. For someone as impatient as me, this does not gel very well. I won't knock it off as a bad brand. Far from it! Modelers have used it successfully for years. And I suppose if I was working on something that doesn't need a lot of attention, such as the shell of a vehicle, then perhaps it's not a bad choice. I do however find the paint to be really sticky if they get on the fingers. The stickiness however is quite handy. See, I normally mount the subjects I wanted painted on a piece of cardboard or a stick with some sticky tack or a roll of tape. This makes handling them while painting rather a simple process. Over-spray will definitely get on these. While I'm waiting for the paint to dry, I can touch the over-spray to check whether the paint is dry or otherwise. It'll feel sticky until it is dry. I started with Humbrol, but found that they were harder to work with than acrylic. Then I discovered Tamiya enamels and found them very easy to use and suited my needs better with their faster drying times. I can start with the next coat or start putting on different colours in almost half an hour to an hour after painting. While you can get all sorts of mixes with Humbrol, Tamiya on the other hand have a very limited selection of pre-mixed enamel paint (not counting their spray paints). Due to my impatience, my preference is currently leaning heavily towards Tamiya enamels. Part of the reason for my impatience is that I'm working with an airbrush. I can empty the paint into a jar and store it while waiting for my work to dry. But then I'd have to completely clean the spray gun so that any paint inside it won't clog the mechanism. This is a tedious process - and having been a bit lax at one time, I ended up clogging it. But that's just me. No matter what type of paint I use or the manufacturer, a paint job will always look stunning if it's done right. A good dose of patience helps too. I certainly need to learn that! The post I made with the Char's Custom Zaku II ver 2.0 painted Santa colours was one of my better recent efforts with enamels.