Editing!

You can see it doesn’t come up very often.

As a result it came as a surprise to everyone, myself included, when I decided I wanted to buy a Revell Corsair kit on my birthday. Part of this desire was born from watching a good YouTube build of a 1/48 Tamiya Corsair; another part was having a 50% off coupon for Michael’s. $8.99 for a 1/48 scale aircraft? Sure.

The post-kit-purchase elation went down several notches when I noticed some differences between the lovely Tamiya version and the [antonym-for-lovely-here] Revell kit. Some of this you can see at a glance; other things didn’t become apparent until doing a dry fit:

- It has raised panel lines
- The engine and the cowl are a single piece:

It's like a troubled one-eyed monster grinning at you.

- Flash and mold lines are everywhere.
- The plastic is Spongy — it feels very soft compared to Bandai, Hasegawa, or Kotobukiya styrene.
- NOTHING fits:

NOTHING.

The first and the last are my biggest issues — it’s a putty nightmare, and rescribing the entire kit for recessed panels is probably not an option when I can pick up the vastly superior Tamiya Corsair for only $20.

But in a way, that’s good. That means I won’t have any compunctions about potentially ruining the kit when I try to make this:

Meh.

into one of these:

Oooh.

I won’t bore you with the details of what a “vanship” is, or how I fell in love with Last Exile. I’m going to bore you with completely different things!

To really make this look like a legitimate vanship, and not just a half-built Corsair*, I’ve got a lot of work ahead.

AND you can get satellite radio for FREE.

This (above) is the antenna/resonator/propulsion thingy. I bent styrene rod around the lid of a large container of Tamiya acrylic, and passed the ends through a closed binder clip to give it some concavity. I connected it to the resonator mount (I am making this up as I go) by drilling holes through the rod and mount, then passing a leftover antenna through all three. These were fixed in place with some plastic cement, and then sanded down to remove the ends of the antenna.

Even fixed in place, the rod has a lot of tension, which makes me nervous. I tried immersing it in hot water and then letting it cool down, but it didn’t seem to have much effect — it’s still springy. Any scratchbuilders out there with suggestions for how I should have done this? I’m thinking if I ever need a shape like this in the future I’m better off using brass wire or the like. This was no fun, and not as accurate as I wanted it to be.

The claudia drive is going to be a combination of styrene strip, pen parts, leftover ordnance from the Corsair, and the front wheels of a Rodimus Prime wrapped in styrene sheet. Do not weep for Rodimus. He had Dutch Elm Disease.

"He lies! Weep for Rodimus!"

I need to fabricate some fairings for the landing gear. Every vanship in memory has the landing gear permanently in the ‘down’ position. The Corsair’s wheels and sparse gear details are perfect for this. I should be able to create the fairings from styrene sheet, seal up the gear doors, and just slide the enclosure on top of what’s left. I need to remember to paint the exposed area of the wheels beforehand.

Something along these lines.

Other, less pleasant things still await. I need to remove the vertical and horizontal stabilizers. The latter is easy: it’s just a patch job over where the part would normally go. The former requires some sawing — the vertical stabilizer is built in to the fuselage. Not too concerned about the cutting, but not thrilled about the repair work. I anticipate scribing some additional details later so I don’t end up with a big, blank slab where the stabilizer used to be.

I also need to make a decision about the cockpit. There’s supposed to be a seat for the navigator as well as the pilot, so if I’m going to embark on that path, I’ll need to fabricate a second chair and a second set of controls. It’s probably easiest to just make a mold of the existing cockpit and make a resin one. That this is the “easy” way terrifies me, since I’ve done neither mold-making nor casting before, but I think it’s still a better option than attempting to scratchbuild a cockpit from styrene sheet (BLEH).

Speaking of which, I also have to remove the canopy (which is also built-in to the fuselage. God, I hate this kit) and make some little windscreens. TOTALLY looking forward to that.

Not pictured: my razor saw induced injuries.

The last big part is attaching the whole propulsion assembly. I’ll have to mount the tailwheel somewhere on that as well and somehow manage to keep the whole thing level. The military-grade vanships in Last Exile have this blade-like prow integrated into the propulsion system. I’ll probably do something similar. It’ll help prevent it from looking like the engine is an afterthought.

The rest is just detail work. I’ll probably scribe some hatches and panel lines. I was thinking of adding some ribbing to the side of the ship a la corrugated aluminum, but I may be satisfied without.

I kinda regret picking the Corsair in some ways — the wings and the intakes are very distinctive, so even if I kick ass all over the place, there’s bound to be someone who will look at it and say, “OMG WHAT DID HE DO TO THAT CORSAIR?!”

And then I’ll have to explain that it’s the Revell, and they’ll say, “OKAY. WHEW. NOW THAT WE’RE PAST THAT CAN YOU HELP ME TURN OFF CAPS LOCK?” and by then it’s become a whole thing and my afternoon is wasted.

More later!

_{*which is technically done already.}

I forget periodically that I built most of the site when my from-scratch HTML and CSS skills were in their infancy, so I don’t look at it with a critical eye as often as I should. There’s still a lot of wonkiness I want to address with alignments and whatnot (my original stylesheet is an exercise in horror).

Will I actually fix these things? Probably. I may just do a whole site revamp and save myself the trouble of fixing what’s going to be rebuilt anyway.

But these are thoughts for men who don’t have another 10 characters to unlock in Dynasty Warriors Gundam 3.

Edit: I can’t stand this being the first item in my blog any longer. The comment below is referring to the image that used to be here.

Ending with a whimper, like usual. I cleaned up an old sketch, and began to lay down my flat colors when the bottom dropped out of my intestines. I’ll try to make it presentable soon, but in the meantime, this is all I can manage. Longer post coming up where I reflect on this batch of weeklies and plan for the next.

As always, thanks to the 12 of you who visit this site.

Unit 939-ZX's primary directive: to hug

You’ll note that the name of the contest with myself isn’t “Make Awesome Every Week 2011″ or “So Good it Hurts 2011.”

Just a reminder.

The band went on to produce such hits as 'Pegusain't' and 'Look at My Horny'

Hardcore.

To be completely honest, this is another loophole entry because I am exhausted and behind in my work. Also, I really wanted to see if I could do a “metal” logo, and I’ve been dying to say ‘unicorns’ in any context for about 5 years.

This monstrosity was created with a warped version of the Josselyn font, which I then split to a few layers, applied a couple gradients, and hand-painted the shadows on a stroke to mimic the bevel (because I was not savvy enough to automate beveling).

Oh, and lens flare courtesy of 1992.

"I regret nothing!"

Large parts of my being are still 9 years old, so for the half hour of painting time, the sound “PSSHSKOOOOOOOOOOOOOM” was on repeat in my head. I gotta work on my spacecrafts; they suck.

Saving Mike's ass since 1998

Ouch.

Multiple things:

• Turns out drawing clouds around the viewer (vs. in the distance) is a totally different game
• I haven’t done a full landscape with any success before, so that trend continues
• Factoring how much time it took to try and fix the problems (above), I ran out of time to put in my figure

I’m going to continue to work on this tomorrow. Yes, we all know it’s not done, but if you don’t know that I wanted more out of it, you could look at it and say, “Oh, it’s a finished piece…it’s just really boring.” So technically, I still made it in under the wire.

By the way, did anybody grasp that this is the sky, and the landscape below contains a lake reflecting said sky? Me neither. I’ll work on that.

The importance of tighter roughs is getting more and more obvious over time. I have a tendency to move forward, convinced I will be fixing things on the fly, but usually it just results in collisions with unforeseen obstacles. Like geese.

God my bomb is lumpy.

Caption unavailable due to unseasonably warm weather

Busy week. Didn’t touch the witch picture at all, and I still have high hopes for it, so instead of trying to half ass it, here’s a chunky alien. 2 hours, where 1 of them was randomly drawing stuff hoping to hit upon something I could draw in an hour. This is full size.

I, for one, have never posed like this in my life.

Yeah. Still no witches.

"I can't hold on to ANYTHING with these hooks."

I really liked Alan Wake. I also thought Thomas Zane’s diving suit was adorable. That’s how things like this happen.

In case you saw last week’s post, this was supposed to be another witch-related piece (slated for last week, originally), but I had to scrap that idea AGAIN because I simply got too busy to devote the time it needs for completion. I am looking forward to knocking that one out little by little this coming week, though. We’ll see if I actually make it or not.

In the meantime, give Mr. Zane here a hug.