Archive for March, 2010

Oh my god, shoes

Invincible. Also, on sale.

I decorated these shoes for a good friend over the holidays.

Nothing too special, except for the raw, unchained power of platonic affection radiating off of the shoes in waves. You know. Otherwise just pen and ink on canvas, and clear-coated*.

^{*For your protection from the unbridled force of manly love.}

First attempts at scribing

I started building the Hasegawa Egg Plane F-16 that I referenced in this post.

I’m not an aircraft or military buff, but I’m a big fan of the F-16 design-wise; I might even want to build a 1/72 or a 1/48 scale one of these days just because it’s so cool-looking. I even played through 95% of Ace Combat 6 with it just because I didn’t want to fly an uglier, superior plane (I’m looking at you, F-22 Raptor).

I’m also a big fan of Galaga and cute things. Why did I tell you this last part, you may ask? Because my plan is to mildly mod this egg plane into a cutesy version of the ship from Galaga.

Anyway, major assembly and seam-fixing is done. One little thing about the egg planes: not a lot of surface detail. It’s a beautiful kit, especially for the price (fits together great), but it lacks panel lines. And I loves me some panel lines. It’s platonic.

After reading a bunch of posts on the subject, I decided to try and add panel lines to the model.

^{See that? Yeah. I made it.}

It’s actually not as hard as I was expecting, though my technique needs a lot of work. I have limited supplies and no templates, so I just basically attacked the thing with an X-acto knife and some modeling tape, and you can too.

At the time I decided to document this, I’d already completed the nose cone (more of a “rescribe” after seam-filling), a large bay on one side, and one access panel. I’m going to cover what I did to add the second access panel, but you can apply the same technique to any shape, including long straight lines.

First, I cut out a panel shape from my Tamiya masking tape and placed it on the body of the kit (this was the second of two identical pieces I cut before I began the first panel)

^{The tape in place. You can see another, larger panel I’d already scribed on this side. Not pictured: my shame at not having a brand-name X-acto knife.}

Once the tape was in place, I ran the back of the X-acto lightly across the edge of the tape. You have to do this with practically zero additional pressure, or your knife will skip, stray, or push your tape into an unrecognizable mess. I ran it across each side somewhere between 10-20 times. Again, apply no additional pressure: you’ll feel nothing for the first 4-5 strokes of the knife, then suddenly you’ll feel it “catch”. At that point it’s pretty easy to keep the knife from straying from the groove. Repeat the same method on each side of the tape, and then peel the tape off. You should see a faint etching of the shape on the model.

If I was really clever, I would’ve taken a photo of that step. Instead, you get this:

^{Above: Authenticity}

With the tape out of the way, I continued to scribe the lines with the back of my off-brand X-acto knife. Probably another 20 strokes per line or so. This inadvertently raises the edges of the cut, giving the surface of the plastic an uneven texture. With the panel lines being fairly deep at this point, it was safe to sand off the relief. This will also eliminate small scratches and deviations*. I used a 400-grit sanding stick at this stage, then went over it again with 600 or 800-grit to eliminate the larger scratches.

^{Small particles of plastic dust will fill your painstakingly etched lines. This is normal. The feelings of despair are also normal.}

That done, I used a modeling-dedicated toothbrush and some gentle scraping with the X-acto to remove the plastic dust from the newly scribed lines, and voila!

^{Above: What voila looks like}

I actually went back at it with the sandpaper to remove more scratches, but when I was done, I had two symmetrical(ish) access panels on the nose of my Egg Plane:

^{Factory-esque results. Depending on the crappiness of your factory.}

I did the same thing to deal with the raised lines on the wings, just sans-tape. The raised ridge in the original mold was enough to guide the knife.

Lack of failure by this time emboldened me enough to do the flaps as well.

^{Pictured: A surprising lack of sucking}

And that’s about it. I’m debating adding more actual panel lines as opposed to the hatches. I can already see how this can go terribly awry if you let yourself go crazy with the scribing, though, so I may quit while I’m ahead.

If you do try this out — particularly if you’re like me and have only a knife and some tape to guide you — go slow and press lightly. Hell, don’t press at all. I got fewer scratches and better results when I took a gentler approach. The instructions I read encouraged a light touch, too, but seriously, this cannot be overemphasized.

These posts and blogs were indispensable in giving me the courage to try this, so check them out for more detailed explanations and actual instructions:

http://nelman.blogspot.com/2008/09/poor-mans-gunpla-scribing-panel-lines.html
http://www.swannysmodels.com/Scribing.html
http://www.clubhyper.com/reference/rescribingda_1.htm

_{*To be clear, I mean deviations from your intended panel line. Your fetish for large-butted Asian librarians will remain intact. Mine did, anyway.}

Chemistry wins again

Ugh.

Okay, long story short, I have had zero luck building this little kit. It’s a BB Strike Noir Gundam by Bandai in my custom color scheme (Strike Blanc? Infinite Pinkness?). It was about $9 from Hobbytown, if memory serves. I like to go full-throttle even on these dinky models so I filled all the seams and glued all the fixed joints. I really wanted it to kick ass.

It didn’t.

Here’s the Cliff’s Notes timeline:

1 Preshaded the helmet way too early, forcing me to mask off large portions of the face that I’d already assembled and painted so that I could fill the seams and repaint. The masking tape pulled the paint right off those areas.

2 Had to repaint the shoulders due to bad planning (like the helmet), but did not fully strip the previous coat of paint. Left texture on the top edges where I fixed the seams. Sanded like a mofo*, repainted 3x, finally was satisfied.

3 It fell off the drying mount. The whole thing. Major dings to the torso and helmet.

4 Enamel panel line wash failed completely. Attempts to clean up actually stripped the basecoat in those areas. Had to bathe the entire torso and legs in a Simple Green bath and start from scratch.

5 2nd time around on the torso was great. Preshading went off without a hitch. This is arguably the best the model ever got, before –

6 It fell off the drying mount again. This time I made no effort to fix the nicks that the impact produced.

7 Coated it in Future in prep for the panel line wash (take 2). The wind blew over the drying mount, and I instinctively caught the model — embedding giant fingerprints in the gloss coat**. But by this point I was starting to get beyond caring, so I waited for it to dry and gently wet sanded the fingerprints out.

8 To avoid a repeat of #4, I used acrylics for the panel line wash. It didn’t work great, but it worked, so I was happy. Better than panel lining with Microns, anyway.

9 Applied ill-advised custom decals. The UN one looks okay, but the 99 is more like 9   9. Don’t know why I thought that was okay at the time.

10 Flat coated the model to seal the decals and kill the sheen. This was the crowning horror. When the laquer-based matte spray hit the panel lines, the wash ran everywhere(!)  covering the model in the large puddles you see in the annotated photo in the header.

I actually don’t understand why that happened — the wash had been dry for 24 hours. I guess I should’ve hit it with another coat of Future before I applied the matte spray. Or used ink instead of acrylic for the wash…or something. I dunno.

I could go back to square one at this point, but I’m not going to. I’m DONE with this model. I’ll keep it around to try new techniques (this is a great candidate for pastel weathering — something I’ve been dying to try), but otherwise I’m writing it off.

Goodbye, Strike. May flights of smudgy angels sing thee to thy rest… On my shelf.

^{Above: Paintjob #2, just before the 2nd panel line wash. The torso hadn’t hit the ground a second time by this point. Still a couple nicks on his face from the tape disaster and the first fall, but otherwise sitting pretty. You can see some of the subtle preshading here on the torso and wings.}

^{Above: Panel line wash#2 and post fall #2. Exposed plastic at the top edge of the left wing is visible. Acrylic is so fragile.}

^{Above: Panel line wash #2, and post fall #2. You can see several dings in the finish on the torso, and the tips of the wings are showing exposed plastic. Also some nasty pooling on the waist armor, but I was willing to live with it.}

^{Above: Flat coated! Oh, and ruined! Notice how the panel lines on the wing were exempt from the reaction? I don’t know what that means either.}

*Mofos being known for how much they love to sand.

**Because I was using my Giant Hands that day, you see.