Thank you to all those that participated in our 31 Days Challenge in the forum. Congratulations to the winners! Below are the entries, their respective places, and number of votes out of the 45 votes cast:

First Place (15 votes)
1/7 (Kotobukiya recast) Kinoshita Takako (Chinese Dress ver)

Second Place (13 votes)
1/6 EL

Third Place (8 votes)
KV2 diorama

Fourth Place (4 votes)
1/6 Queen’s Blade Mercenary Echidna

Fifth Place (3 votes)
1/72 UH-1B Huey Wreck

Sixth Place (2 votes)
1/13 Pteranodon

Contest Starts February 21st!

If I can do it in 10, you can do it in 31. Our next contest is a speed-build. Take the next week to gather your supplies, kits, materials and ideas. Then on February 21, 2009 we start building. Tools down on March 23rd, 31 days later.

Da Roolz:

• You can build and enter anything EXCEPT Bandai Gundam or Gundam kits in general. Let’s face it, who can’t build one of those in a month. They’re too easy and really won’t push anyone to try new things and expand their skills. Any other kit in any other scale is fine.
• You cannot start before 2/21/2009
• You must take images, no matter where you are of your project and display them for the 3/23/2009 deadline. Call it a “Hall of Fame” or “Hall of Shame”.
• Kit must have a base. Not a piece of clear acrylic or a wooden plaque. No, make an actual scene-type base. Dirt, water, concrete, whatever. Be creative!
• You must show a dated image of your unstarted kit and materials as proof of not cheating. Be creative on how you accomplish this.
• Must show final images by Noon EST March 24th.

That’s it. What’s the point in this you might ask? Well for one our contests have started to drag on and on and on and without proper motivation you guys just procrastinate and don’t finish. I and others have found that trying to push yourself like this keeps your motivated. Also you guys are still stuck on Gundam. I like it too, but you’re not expanding your skills. Doing something else will make you learn new things and help you be a better modeler whether you go on to other subjects or back to Gunpla.

Plus it’s for fun. Enjoy this and go crazy! It’s cold out, what else you gonna do?

Glory awards for fastest GOOD build, most complex, and best vertical use of small footprint base. Fit as much as you can, nicely, on as small a display as you can. Go up! Perhaps there will be a prize or two at the end but the real rewards are the satisfaction in completion and expanding your skillset.

Questions, coments, builds, etc in the forum »

When I first decided to add a blog to this site I told myself that I wasn’t going to use it to bitch and rant about personal problems and such. There’s enough of that out there already and frankly who cares? This gets close to the rant line, but hopefully it’ll be more informative and useful than a mere BAWWW session.

There’s been some chatter lately at a few boards about helping the newbies, making the newbies be better modelers, and how those of us with experience just don’t do enough. Well, I take a bit of offense to that as I and many of my peers definitely do their part to be helpful and share our knowledge.

Being Helpful »

I get a LOT of emails asking for help on this or that. Honestly, I don’t answer half of them. For one, there’s just not enough hours in the day and two, the information requested is out there and easy to find if the person writing would take the minimal effort to do a quick search. Why waste my time when someone isn’t willing to attempt to find info on their own first? This is why I create in-progress pages and the occasional tutorial. This is my way of helping out those that posess the initiative to do some research on their own first. It’s far too easy to ask for help and sadly, there’s a lot of lazy people out there looking for quick answers. Plus when I do answer, it’d be nice to get a thank you for my troubles. Maybe 25% of those I help bother replying one way or another as to whether I was helpful.

When I don’t know something I search for the answers. Do I always find what I’m looking for? Heck no! But in the process of that search I find that my efforts are seldom wasted.  I often discover new techniques, designs, and inspiration that I can apply to future projects. I’ve got hundreds of bookmarksand saved pages from my travels through various modeling sites and put these to good use. One of the first things I was taught in graphic design was to keep folders full of reference and inspiration. Be a pack rat of knowledge as it does help!

Now this begs the question: “can I do more?”. Of course I could do more and so could other experienced modelers, but people need to realize a few things. As modelers, we love to model. It’s a passion, hobby, and takes time. We also have things that we like to do or need to do aside from our hobby. Family, work, other hobbies, etc…  It’s easy to get sucked into everyone elses problems, concerns needs, etc… and I could spend hours every day helping others with my wealth of knowledge. But then where would I be? When would I have time to model? Spend time with my family? Work? Exercise? Do the bills? Shop?

I think you get the point. Show some patience to those you want help from and remember that they have lives too. Show some appreciation for the help they provide and let them know that they’ve helped you out. And show some initiative and do some research first on your own. I find that I am more likely to respond to someone asking for help if they’ve shown they’ve done some research on their own first. For example:

“I was reading through your progress page for the ______ you did. I read it, but you didn’t mention how you did _____. Is it something I can find in another in-prog?”

As opposed to:

“I like Gundam. What kind of airbrush should I get”

The first question shows that research was done. The second… not so much. In fact there’s a plethora of airbrushing information on this very site in the help section of the forum, tips, and even this blog. Not to mention the countless other sites that cover that exact same topic. Initiative people! Show some!

But to sum it up, we do what we can and have time to do. Remember, it’s a hobby. Your hobby, my hobby and other people hobby and all of us only have so much time to practice it.

Leveling Up Newbies Skills »

Another issue has been regarding the quality of work shown at various modeling sites, especially BAKUC. Some argue that these people need to up their game and do better work. Others argue that “it’s a hobby” and that people grow at their own pace or desire. While I’d love to see better work on BAKUC.com’s gallery, (who wouldn’t?) I also realize that we all start somewhere and that people posting their work for critique at all means something.

When I started modeling, I produced a bunch of crap. My first few kits were just snapped, panel lined, and decaled with minimal painting. Then I got a compressor for my 10 year old airbrush leftover from art school (that I still use to this day) and began painting them more. At first I painted only a few colors, then started painting more, then the whole kits got painted. After going through my 5 1/100 EW Wing kits and an MG Stamen, not seen on this site, Igot the hang of airbrushing my kits and began posting them online and experimenting with the paint more. After I got comfortable enough with the paint, then decals, I felt the desire to start tackling seams. Then flash, then scratchbuilding, and so-on and so-on… you get the point.

We all start somewhere and many of these early attempts of mine can still be seen in my gallery. You’ll see seams! You’ll see bad paint! But what you’ll also see if you look closely is that every kitwas hopefully better than the last. And with every kit I tried something new. I still do that to this day. Never stop learning and growing, but do so at your own pace, not what some troll on the interweb thinks you should do. At the end of the day ask yourself if you’re happy with it. Did you learn from your mistakes? If so then you’re on the right track.

Then when you’ve learned enough, do your part to pass on the knowledge. Do this in your own way though and on your own schedule. I help by chronicling what I do in in-progs, tutorials and forum posts. That’s not helpful to everyone, but like I said, “do what you can”.

So boys and girls, aside from the FichtenFoo.com redesign, I had another project this summer. Since May 2007 I’ve been contracted to do freelance web work on the design of the North America Bandai Action Kit Universal Cup (BAKUC) Online website!

This website was programmed from the ground-up to not only be a contest website, but a model gallery and community as well. While the forum is still under construction, the rest of the site is ready to go! Any modeler can go and upload their photos to the gallery, get feedback and votes, then enter them into various contest such as the big one: The BAKUC 2007 Semi-Finals for North America! Win that and you win a trip to Hong Kong to compete in the BAKUC finals! There will also be a monthly contest and random draw competitions. All of which have great prizes for winning!

Anyway, this was a great project to work on and I’m proud to be a part of it. It has a lot of potential and will hopefully show Bandai that NA still loves gunpla! Don’t give up on us Bandai! (Oh, and make an MG Gerbera Tetra already Bandai! What are you waiting for?)

It wasn’t an easy process, but after a few redesigns we got a great looking site full of functionality and potential. The Masked BAKUC was fun to draw in the chibi style. There’s probably a few bugs and other issues that’ll come up as they do with any new site, but the programmer is fantastic and will have everything running smoothly!

Thanks to Sean for bringing me on with this project and congrats on a programming job well done! I also want to thank Zerobxu for helping me tremendously with the content writing, proofreading, spell checking, and everything else with this. You have a gift for the written word. I have a few thank-you surprises to send you for all the help. Just need your new addy. Thanks to to the beta-testers as well. Great job guys!

So go register and enter your works into the gallery and the contests. It’s free! Also the first 100 entrants can get a free Action Base with the purchase of any model from HobbyWave!

This site is for everyone regardless of skill level. There will be contests for Juniors ans Open categories with each category split into beginner, intermediate, advanced, and expert skill classes.Tell your friends and spread the word! The more people that enter the site, the more fun it’ll be. You can help spread the word with this banner.

Thanks for looking and I hope you guys enjoy the site. It’s been hard keeping it a secret, especially with some of the flak I’ve gotten recently, but now it’s done and we can all enjoy the hobby together.