The 1/35 scale Martian Light Hovertank is all done and I finished it a day before deadline. Yay me! Anyway, enjoy the images and keep an eye out for this kit when it hits the Mig Productions website and hobby shops in December. If you get it and build one, please let me know and I’ll post it up here. Onto the images:

The Y-Wing is complete. The plan is for this to be part of a larger diorama down the road, so not a ton of images or a detailed base. The base is the stock one that came with the kit spray painted in matte black. The last step was to apply various Mig Pigment powders to do the scorch marks and engine burn. For the engines I used both “Plasma Burn” (blue) and Rock Exhaust” from their Fantasy line. To seal the pigments I sprayed the Mig Fixer lightly onto the kit with my airbrush. This seems to be the best way to use it unles your pigments are in piles. Then the airbrush would blow them away. Anyway, here’s the pics!

Well, it’s finally all done. Only 5 months of off-and-on work so not too bad. Now I just need to figure out shipping via an art shipping firm and pray that it arrives safely. Here’s the final images:

Here’s my completed Pumpkin Girl fig for the 31 Days contest. I finished her with a few days to spare which was nice. I could had completed her quicker, but I realized that I don’t really care for painting these anime girl figures. Deunan and Gally were fun since I really like the characters and they didn’t have to be so clean.  This one though… meh… It was a struggle to pay attention to it and not shelf it throughout the whole build. But it’s done and now I can focus on bigger and better things.

The base is a simple wooden box from Michaels filled with plaster for weight. The soil is made from celluclay covered in sand then painted with Raw Umber for the soil. Thread-wrapped wire and thin wire was used for the pumpkin vines. The leaves were cut-out by hand and then airbrushed along with the vines.

About The Build »

So I heard about a MaK contest coming up whose deadline is the 12th of January. When did I find out? I think it was December 28th or so. Oops! I thought for a few days that it was too bad since that would be fun to participate in. Finally on the morning of the 31st I decided to put off the ScopeDog and try to build something cool in 12 days for the contest.

I decided to build up an awesome Hardboiled AFS conversion on a waterfall base with a large oak tree. Things were going smoothly until 5-days in when I was informed that the conversion kit I was using wasn’t “official” and would anger the Japanese. I had no idea when I purchased a few of them that it was considered “bad” so to the Japanese MaK community you have my apologies. While I still could enter the kit in the contest, the fallout would had been more of a mess than I wished on some friends of mine. Instead I decided to make this build purely for personal sport and see if I still could finish this in under 12 days.

When you read the progress page and look at the final images you’ll see that as usual I made something that should had been easy and quick into something way complex. Click Here for the progress and tutorials on everything I did on a day-by-day account for what ended up being a 10 day build.

Image Gallery »

About The Build »

I’ve been wanting to paint something in pink
for a while now, but aside from perhaps the Infinite Justice,
I couldn’t decide what else might look good. Then I picked
up the Astraea Type F and it looked perfect for a pink-build!

The kit itself was very easy to put together.
Not a whole lot of seams or masking involved when painting.
The parts fit is perfect as usual with Bandai kits. This kit
comes with all the things that the other Astraea comes with,
but has extra parts for the “mask”.

The worst part of the kit was the rubber parts
for the panels in the arms, legs, and “kidneys”.
I replaced those with ribbed styrene sheet.

Ironically the most difficult part of this kit
was getting a good pink color. I prefer Tamiya Acrylics and
there was just no mixes that I could find that came out vivid
enough. So I decided to seek out some Magenta Pigment in order
to tint some flat white to the shade I need. Well, apparently
Magenta Pigment isn’t cheap so I went to Michaels to have
a look around.

I found some PearlEx pigment sets, and Series
2 had just the color I wanted. Unfortunately (or so I thought)
it had a pearescent sheen to it. I decided to get it anyway
and work with it. It ended up working perfectly and the pearl
sheen was really minimized when mixed with the flat white.
I mixed enough pigment with my white to get the desired color
and did a test spray. It went on a little thick and lumpy,
but thinning it much more fixed that. The end result was the
perfect color. In fact, I also have a pearl cyan and yellow
that I could potentially use to make any color I want via
CMYK values.

Another benefit of the pearl powders was in
doing a color-shift GN-Particle effect to the clear parts
and lenses. To achieve this I sprayed the back of the clear
parts with Future + Green PearlEx, then I added blue pearlEx
to that and sprayed the back-side again, finally I added clear
green Tamiya to that and gave it a final spray. Then dip it
in future to give it a nice gloss and place it over Alclad
Chrome painted internals for the full effect. The end result
is fantastic and unfortunately much better looking in person.
Almost gem-like.

About The Builds »

A while back the same client that commissioned the Hi-Zack and Strike Noir from me also asked me to do an Overflag in red… a Red Baron of sorts. I figured that I might as well do my kit at the same time and knock them both out. Mine I did as a Tallgeese-styled
build called the “Overgoose”. This used a 1/100 Tallgeese shield donated by a member of my forum and a scratch-built “Dober Gun” which attached to the forearm via magnets.

About The Build »

This steampunk inspoired suit was done for a group-build at the Machinen Kreiger forums. I decided to do a what-if type piece for it. What would a MaK suit look like in the fictitious steampunk era/world?

About The Build »

This is a Taco-34 Beetle walking tank from the Japanese Junk Tank Rock series.

About The Build »

I’ve been lazy and sitting on these images for a while now. Here they are!