Hello and welcome!
A quick blog today, because my bus failed to arrive this morning, I have some restock to process and I need to refill my shelves with the stuff I brought out for the modelbouwdag in Duffel on Sunday.
Speaking of: that was fun! A small event, yes, but this was the first edition of hopefully many to come. And I can say 'I was there!'. Sales-wise I did pretty well (it helps being the only commercial shop there), but the most important part: I got to chat with a lot of nice people, all avid modellers or starting modellers. If you're from around Duffel and are looking for a group of enthousiastic and knowledgeable modellers to meet up with, go check them out. There's no website, but they have a Facebook page. If I'm not mistaken, they get together every Wednesday.
Here's a picture of my stand:
It's about what you can expect from me at the moment at events. The next one for me is
KMK Scaleworld in Geel, 31st of May.
On to the models, then.
The Focus was picked up by its owner, who seemed quite happy with it, so I'm happy, too. Work on the McLaren MP4/5B will commence this week. Deadline somewhere beginning of July.
The T-72 interior is nearly done. Almost all the small parts are painted and installed. The back wall of the crew compartment is in place, with its shells mounted:
I did forget the cable conduit runs along this, following on from the side walls, so I had to paint it in the same oil paint colour as those. I also gave the driver's seat an extra coat of black oil, to give it some slight texture.
The engine compartment is really chock-full of stuff. Credit to Amusing Hobby: last week I had a customer who was examining it (the engine itself wasn't installed yet) and pointing out to his wife all the separate components. Apparently, he had worked on this engine in the past, and could recognize what was in there.
I then painted and installed the engine. This is the interior basically completed:
There's just a couple of small parts still to be fixed and some more weathering to be done. I've seen several models where the ignition cables were scratchbuilt as well. I'll probably do this as well, but I need to study some pictures first.
To be continued.
I promised some aircraft last week. So: the Bloch has received its camouflage. I used some
masking putty to lay out the pattern of the green/gray edges. The green/brown edges just need some basic shape, as I will need to mask for brown as well.
I filled in the rest of the gray mask with putty as well. For bigger planes, I tend to use masking tape for that, but in this case, I have enough putty and don't need to waste tape.
Green Moss was sprayed and post-shaded:
Then the putty was removed, and re-applied covering both gray and green, ready for the brown colour. My first post-shade here was too stark, so I went back and 'glazed' (spray very diluted paint in a wide mist) with the original Ammo Rust Tracks, a reddish-brown colour, to bring back the correct tint.
Here's the final result:
I broke off one of the landing gear legs, so the plane was on paint jars until the glue dried.
Next steps: spray the French tricolore on the rudder, give it a gloss coat, apply decals.
Finally, the Viggen also received a layer of paint. I used Mr. Hobby
H-58 Interior Green. The colour is right, but I feel it's just a tad too dark. I tested out lightening it with yellow. The resulting tint looked a bit better, so I'll be overspraying it with that mix.
The Viggen's splinter camouflage is notoriously difficult to paint. I have a masking set, but the first colours' coverage will have to be approximated. So I spray more than needed, but don't cover the entire plane, which is why it looks somewhat messy:
Lots of masking ahead...
That's it.
See you next week!
