MV Australis Black Site Studios Pt. 1

Here is my first midway entry for Dave Stone's "Paint What You've Got Challenge". Everything in this first photo was done in about a day and a half and I'm certain I could have completed the whole thing in another day.

Honestly this build has unfortunately hit a wall, and I was cruising along nicely too despite some issues with the initial paint job which I ended up re-doing.

It may be hard to see in the photos but the black painted parts had all kinds of odd white splotches all over them. It almost looked like mildew but I can't imagine how that could possibly be.

I cleaned up all the sprues with the black paint the best I could and ended up having to put three coats of the new black paint on to completely cover whatever that white stuff was, but it all worked out thankfully.

I will tell you right off the bat that in hindsight I didn't look closely enough at the photo of the completed ship and just jumped right in with two feet and started building it. I didn't give the kit enough thought about what I wanted to accomplish beyond simply repainting and adding more "ship" details and there is one really big thing I wish I could go back and change. 

I really wish that I would have increased the height of the hull, and this is why I've hit a wall with the build. With this kind of ship I think that the hull needs to higher than it currently is - here's my quick mock up of that height difference, maybe not quite twice the height but definitely at least half that. Again, in hindsight it's a huge oversight on my part and I immediately realized it when I put all the hull pieces together across the table in the first photo.

So, do I just push on with the ship as it is or do I attempt to pull off the water line pieces and increase the height of the hull, and hope that the damage won't be enough to ruin the entire build. I'm not sure because the water line pieces are a thin cardboard like material and I know that they aren't going to come off easily.

But beyond my hold up with the hull height another thing I changed was the overall color of the ship - the hull originally was red with the waterline being black - above on the left. I reversed those to the hull being black and the waterline red. This gives the ship a more traditional painted look. 

So while I stepped away from the ship to decide how I want to proceed I plugged along painting more Star Wars models and Lord of the Rings models. As well as cleaning up and fixing several Lord of the Rings models I picked up off of Ebay for cheap.

I completed over 40 Army of the Dead models from LotR.

That's a pretty big accomplishment for me lol! I don't think I've completed that many models of the same type since some ACW stuff I did probably like six or seven years ago.

Now I just have to decide how I want to base them - do I put them on my favorite thin clear bases or do a traditional base? If I go clear then I will have opened a Pandora's Box of madness because then I'll have to do the same to all my other LotR models.

Speaking of LotR here are those Ebay auctions I mentioned above.

I'm going to call them Ebay Rescues, because as you can see they needed quite a bit of help. All of these are the actual photos from Ebay.

Lots of modifications needed for missing and broken parts.

 

And a whole bunch of Simple Green to get all that old paint off.

But miracles do happen lol!

I decided to give Gandalf a sword instead of trying to fashion a new staff and honestly I'm really pleased with the end result.

Still need to make a staff for the foot version of Gandalf though.

And Theoden back with a nice new gray prime.

I also completed some more Legion models - more droids, because you can never have enough.

And a squad of Death Troopers. These proved way more difficult than they should have been. I tried a gloss finish and it looked awful. I then tried a paint on gloss and only did some of the more prominent armor, and that was a train wreck too, so it was straight black and call it a day.

And last, I started working on some Rebel Fleet troopers.

I always liked these uniforms despite those helmets functionality being a real head scratcher.

Until next time, thanks for looking!

Ivor