Zandina’s House Painting Continued

Not a lot of work completed on the models this week, just some paint work on Zandina’s town house which features in Karl’s story. Thought I would share some more ‘in progress’ photos.

First thing I did was to mix the black paint with water to wash over the brick work around the lower front part of the building. This gives the brick work a deeper, more solid appearance. Once this was dry, I dry brushed with the basic orange.

For the roof which had already been painted with a mix of burnt umber and black I also dry brushed/smeared with the orange.

I know BigLee talks about quality of paint brushes, for this work when painting on wood, wall filler and cardboard I tend not to pay out for brushes which get wrecked very quickly. I’ll save the good brushes for when I get back to the figures. These brushes are larger sized and really have seen better days but for smearing, dry brushing large areas and stippling they really need to be hard wearing rather than quality tipped. 

Karl is shipping

It has been a long time in the waiting, but the wait is finally over. The books are hot off the press and being dispatched this weekend to those who have pre-ordered. For those who have been waiting, many thanks for your support.

This is the adventure of my original RPG character, albeit not the adventure he was originally created for. The story has developed quite a lot since that first time Karl set foot in the streets of mystery and adventure. 

How? 

Now that would be telling, as the old saying goes, you’ll have to read the book to find out.

Zandina's House First Painting

The blog has been a bit quiet mainly because I wanted the posting to be about model work, and not much model work has been achieved recently. I will soon be adding another book review and a piece about my love / hate relationship with the iphone – the device I’ve used to take these photos today.

The one thing that has progressed is Zandina’s house. I managed to finish the roof and sanded down the sides to get any excess wall filler off the wood work, and cleaned up the wood work filling in any gaps. Next step was the black under coat. I used a basic black acrylic paint worked into the nooks and crannies using an old paint brush. This had to be repeated a second time as once dried, the paint left small white speckled patches. Again a slightly more watered down black paint was worked into the gaps to give a good consistent undercoat.

Then using just three additional basic paints I set about applying the first base coat of actual colour. These are the darker shades that will be brought up lighter with varying layers. So far I’ve used Pound stores’s Black and Orange, Wilko’s Burnt Umber, and Americana’s Butter.

The black was used as the undercoat, and then mixed with the orange for the first colour layer of the brick work; it was about 75% orange to 25% black. The roof tiles was about 50% mix of burnt umber and black, the wooden side panels was burnt umber and the plaster walls Americana’s Butter. The wooden beams will be painted over with quality black paint after once the walls are finished.

The next stages will be to add the lighter shades and weathering.

Doctor Who Adventures with Figures

Especially for Nikko, and anyone else interested in the rubbery figures that come with the occasional issue of Doctor Who Adventures, here are the full details of the current issue, and the recent two other issues with these figures on.

Current issue

Cover date: 29 March – 4 April 2012, UK price £2.99, Issue 262

9 – 771750-171982-13

You’ve got the 5 coloured Daleks

Judoon, Ood, Silurian, Cyberman & Sontaran

2x Weaping Angels, Med Bot, Silent and Minotaur.

Recent Issues

Cover date: 9 – 15 February 2012, UK Price £2.50, Issue 255

9 – 771750-171036-06

8 Silent & 8 Silurian

Cover date: 2 - 8 February 2012, UK Price £2.50, Issue 254

9 – 771750-171036-05

8 Judoon & 8 Ood

Up on the Roof

The sun is up,

The sky is blue,

The garden’s a mess,

But I’ve a back ache too.

With the weather having taken a change for spring, I really should have spent today mowing the lawn and getting the garden back into some semblance of order, but the old back is still playing up. I hope to see a physio next week to have my legs twisted and my spine pulled in such a way as only they can. I’ve had it done in the past and it really helps, so I hope that come the Easter weekend I’ll be in a better shape to get the garden challenge done. Watch this space, or twitter because I’ll probably be calling for someone to come and find me lost in the long grass.

Anyway with the sun out and not too strong, I took  the opportunity to sit in the garden with the sun warming my back (see purely medicinal you understand) I got the chimneys added to Zandina’s house using some plastic spongy packing covered in the ready mixed wall filler. I had tried to find my foam board off cuts but they’re buried somewhere at the moment – spring clean certainly needed inside as well as out at the moment – so I used this packing stuff instead, cutting two rectangular blocks which I then cut triangles out so that they fitted over the roof.  I glued them on then covered, after a while, with the ready mix filler. Once I had allowed that to go off I finished tiling with small cut squares of card to finish the roof. To cap the tiles I used thinly rolled snakes of the wall filler and pressed them down along the top edges. Once this has dried I will forge ahead with the clean up before under coating the whole model.

 

Just a quick note as well this week to other Doctor Who fans, this week’s issue of Doctor Who Adventures comes with an assortment of monster figures, some not having been released before. This looks like a mini selection box, and I’m sure from their rubbery texture they all have soft centres.

You’ve got the 5 coloured Daleks

Judoon, Ood, Silurian, Cyberman & Sontaran

2x Weaping Angels, Med Bot, Silent and Minotaur.

Raising the Roof

So that New Year’s resolution goes out of the window, well, sort of, the one where I was determined to post more updates this year. There again, there has not been much progress in the last few weeks to speak of.  A busy couple of weekends left me with little time, and this week I managed to either trap a nerve or pull a muscle in my back which has left me pretty unable to do much. Before anyone asks, no I was not building a full sized house, swinging from the light fittings or anything else adventurous or suspect – I simply turned to speak to someone whist seated. So there you go. Anyway let’s get this actual post done before the pain killer wear off.

What I was going to talk about last week was Zandina’s house. I had decided to get some tiling done on the roof, when I unboxed the model and realised just how unhappy I was with the roof in general. There was a gaping hole along the edges, the roof itself was too much sunk in, so before tiling could begin some redial work had to take place.

I glued some more card inside the roof cavity to bolster up, and hold down the flapping roof edges, and added additional layers of card over the top of the existing roof to raise the level nearer to the side beams. 

I even had to raise part of the side of the porch tower roof and add a missing beam in. Oh the delights of rushing. Anyway, with all that left to dry the tiling could not start for another few days.

Now the tiling has begun and would you believe it, all the tiles I had previously cut have gone missing, I think they’re boxed up somewhere but I’ve had to cut extra.

Once I’ve added the chimney (whoops nearly forgot that too) and completed the tile coverage I think I’ll get away with it. The chimney will be added on as a couple of pieces of foam board over the roof top. What you might not be able to see on the photo is the text on the added pieces of card taken from an Amazon delivery. It states how to responsibly dispose of the cardboard packaging, I’m not sure this was their original idea.

Sunny Sunday Building the Ghost Town

It is the last weekend of February, we should be under several feet of snow in the UK but instead this Sunday offered brilliant sunshine, so much so I was able to sit outside this afternoon without a jacket whilst working on the models. It is so much easier to be able to use the table outside, you can sand things down, bits of wood can fly off when you clip them without causing clean up nightmares, and I personally have more space to work on.

After completing some housework and baking (less said the better) I put a couple of hours in on the slowly growing ghost town built from coffee sticks and in a lot of cases recycled boxes.

A couple of weeks ago I had gathered up some odd boxes, glued them together, and along with a cut down Pringles tube I had build a frame work for another building. The tube I cut in half length ways, using one side for this curved wall. I over cut the length I needed, cutting the excess into a lip which I folded back and glued to the top of the neighbouring box to give it greater surface area for sticking with, then glued along the edge and bound the whole lot together with tape whilst the glue dried.

This afternoon I started applying the sticks to the building, and added more to the other pizza box based house as well. I’m using the quicker method I mentioned previously, intending to build the frame on top of the base layer of sticks for quickness. Although I do agree I prefer the look of the more rustic earlier buildings where the frame was built then smaller sticks were glued in the gaps. I have an idea to ‘rustic’ up the new approach once finished, so let’s see where this experiment takes me.

Once I have the wood covering complete on all three models I’ll then start the painting process, I hope the weather stays nice for the next few weeks so I can get these finished.

Like I said, less said the better!