February Doldrums

I'm sure you can tell that February has not seen a lot of production from me. Its been a stressful month for a number of different reasons. I think the biggest was the whole Hippo episode. I'm glad I was able to get it done and delivered to my brother but I didn't get to enjoy the process and I didn't get to do everything I really wanted to do. He was more than a little demanding about the whole thing and said a couple of things that really upset me quite a bit. It happens in families sometimes and I'll get over it.

It did affect my desire to work on anything this month not that I lack for things to do. I currently have 3 projects (it could be stretched to 4) on my bench that I need to do something with. Finish is probably the word I'm looking for.

#1 - The Church. The church is at that awkward stage. There is light at the end of the tunnel with this one but what is left is tedious. I need to finish getting the stained glass in the windows. I need to get all the corner strips cut and glued into place and finishing textures applied. The roof, at least, is in place but there is a lot of paint work going on there. Enough that I'll probably pull out the airbrush to get the base coat on and then get the final weathering on the whole thing finished after that. I wouldn't be surprised if there isn't another 10-15 hours left to go.

So close and yet so far.

#2 - HO Scale Minis. There are 13 of these guys just waiting to be finished off. Just need to pull out the blues again and it should be reasonably quick. Maybe a couple of hours here.

#3 - O Scale Minis. There are 7 of these guys in exactly the same state as the HO minis. I stretching this into project number 3 since I really paint them all at the same time.

Just crying out to be finished even though I don't have either an HO or O scale layout at this time.

#4 - O Scale Gunsmith. The reasons I want to do this are mixed. This is a kit my wife actually started with just to see if its something she would enjoy doing. She decided it was not something she liked and further commented that the instructions required a translator (she is an IT person and while she is a director now she began her career pulling network cables, setting up servers and pcs). I consider this particular kit to be pretty basic. Its the Gunsmith kit from Stoney Creek Models and was part of the Crossroads Collection which Roger Malinowski envisioned as kits that he would keep available as opposed to his annual limited run kits. The reason I have pulled this out is because I recently learned that Roger had passed away from cancer. I have seen this announced on any of the model railroad forums that I frequent. I decided that I was going to build every Stoney Creek kit that I own, about a dozen, even though I don't currently have a layout for them to live on. This is the obvious first candidate since it has already been started. I plan to add an interior to this since there is the potential it might occupy real-estate that's right up front. While it has been started I wouldn't be surprised to see this one eat up another 20 hours or so of time to build and finish.

I think its been sitting in this box for about 6 years at this point.

Again its not that I lack any projects to work on. I just can't quite get up the enthusiasm to work on anything at the moment.

Painting the HO ScaleHumans - Skintones

I went back to try and find the ScaleHumans on Shapeways because I forgot to bookmark it. Shapeways drives me crazy. ScaleHumans is the name of sculptor's shop on Shapeways. That's the easiest way to get to his stuff (Shops/scalehumans). If you are trying to look for him as the designer you need his name, not the shop. The sculptor is Richard Kapuaala (designer/rkapuaala) and that gets you to his bio on Shapeways and you can get to his shop from there as well.

Back to the painting. I finished up the fleshtones on these. I, of course, went a bit to wide with my last skin tone and had to dial it back with a glaze of my dark skintone (Burnt Red Brown, A.MIG-0134). Then it was back to the main highlight (applied a bit more carefully this time) and followed that with one more higher just to emphasis some of the facial features.

The facial details on these is a bit better than the ones from Modelu. That little bit of exaggeration by the sculptor goes a long way to be able to make the details pop.

Skintones:

Burnt Red Brown - A.MIG-0134

Red Leather - A.MIG-0133 

Burnt Sand - A.MIG-0118

Painting the HO ScaleHumans - Detail Wash

After some relatively intensive training over the last week and a half I have finally found my way back to the workbench.

I'm back to the HO scale group from ScaleHumans on Shapeways. I only had time to do the basic wash to bring out the details on these. This really made the detail pop, but it also emphasized the printing lines on them as well. You can definitely see the difference between the Tan Fine Detail plastic and the Clear Ultra Fine Detail plastic. When I order again I'm definitely going with the Clear Ultra Fine.

Like with previous work this initial thin wash is done with Reaper Miniatures' Brown Liner. Because I do two thin washes I use Vallejo Airbrush thinner to thin it out instead of water.

These seated engineers are all printed in Ultra

.

Pretty sure this one is in tan

These three are all done in tan plastic

This is a mix. The two on the left are in tan the two on the right are in ultra

Painting the HO ScaleHumans - Priming

The Holidays are over and I finally have some time to get back to the workbench. I'm going to start the year off working on the HO scale prints from ScaleHumans (available on Shapeways). I had prepped both the HO and O scale versions a couple of weeks ago so its time to get down to business with a little primer.

Once more to the airbrush booth with Badger Stynylrez grey primer. Nothing special here, thinned the primer a little bit set the psi to 10.

Here are the results:

They look pretty good at this stage, but I am concerned about what look like printing artifacts/rough patches and a general fuzziness to some of the prints. I'm going to go ahead and get some paint on these and see how they look after that first wash. Otherwise I may be experimenting to see how I can finish them better for painting. I had selected a tan for one set (which I shouldn't have been able to) and ultra for the other set. They are easy to tell apart, the ultra ones are visibly smaller and I don't know if that's because of the material they are printed in. The only way to know for sure would be to order the other set in ultra and see what happens.

I love this conductor. Unfortunately I won't be able to use him on the Warehouse Row layout, wrong era. Everyone else is generic enough to pass for the late 50s without a problem.