Model Showcase: Iron Man Portal Turret (NECA)

Portal and Portal 2 are two of the sharpest, wittiest, challenging, and fun games I've ever played.
So, when NECA and subsequently Thinkgeek released this blank vinyl version of the turret, I knew I had to do something fun with it. I picked one up, and decided to make a quick weekend project out of it. All in all, this probably took a total of around 1-2 hours of actual work, the weekend-long part just being drying time.




This image is used from NECA's site for informational purposes only, I do not claim ownership of this image.

I'm not the world's best free-hand artist, so I didn't want to do an actual picture, so I wracked my brain to come up with a character or something that had a center circle placement as its primary focus. After a lot of deliberation, I settled on trying my hand at making an "Iron Man" themed turret.

In actuality, completing this bad boy was pretty quick and painless. Since its not going anywhere but my own personal display shelf, and its of a very cheap variety of vinyl, I did no sanding, filing, smoothing, or any clean up at all. Just laid the paint straight to it. I started with a Tamiya gray primer, then sprayed the model with Humbrol red enamel as an undercoat to Alclad's Pale Gold.

From there, it was a fairly simple masking job, just laid masking tape across the areas I wanted to keep gold, using an Xacto to trim out the places that would be red, then sprayed with Alclad's Clear Red.

After the major airbrushing was done, it was a fairly simple task of picking out the black and silver pieces, then getting the airbrush back out one last time for the arc reactor/eye part, spraying it small bits of Tamiya Sky Blue, gradually mixed with white toward the middle.