What's on my desk? Part 27.

Here we are again. How's your vacation going (if you have any)?

Progress on the French tank crew! It's going well and they're starting to look good, with a little help from Bruce on Wednesday. The one on the left (let's call him Pierre) is finished apart from the headgear and hair. The other (how about François?) has his leather jacket painted. Pants and boots to follow. Their boots and lower legs will need some dust applied to tie them in with the very dirty ARL, but all in all they're almost done.

The house then. I sanded and sanded and then sanded some more. I also cracked some seam lines but in the end the window frames were finally fitted. To give you an idea, this is how all of them fitted before any work was done:

Fun, huh? I guess this is one of the reasons why these houses were discontinued. They're cool and all, but there's a LOT of work to be done to make them actually look good.

The bigger house is supposed to be a café. All that is provided for the big windows are closed shutters. Not very attractive, so I have the plan of making a big plate glass window there (maybe with some lettering?). The rough opening where the window fits also has a damaged corner, so if I can hide that away, so much the better.

So I sanded it smooth and glued some leftover wood strips as a frame. Once painted I'll fit a piece of transparant plastic in it and fix it with four more strips on the other side. Hopefully that'll look great.

After all the window frames were fixed, I primed it inside and out with Citadel Wraithbone (which is fast becoming one of my favorite rattle can primers). I'm planning on simulating some wallpaper on the insed rooms, so I'll have to look up some old patterns on the interwebs. There's no glass provided in the kit, so I'll have to make all the windows from a transparant plastic sheet.

Finally, the street. After strenghtening it and sanding the edges, I primed it and then painted it in greys, then picked out some individual cobbles. The process will be largely the same as my dreadnought base. The inside floors of the houses were also done. The off-white areas are where the house walls will fit, so I made sure to get some overlap in order to eliminate any white showing through once they're in place.

You might notice that it's all a little flat. The inside floors, the sidewalk and the street itself are all on the exact same level. I'm not sure if elevated sidewalks were a thing in the 1940's or if this a limitation of the kit. So maybe a second reason why Miniart doesn't make these anymore?

That's it! I hope to finish the figures soon. I'm sure the buildings will still take some weeks, but I've made more progress on it these past few weeks than I've done in years.

See you next week!