Monday, September 8, 2014

WIP: Orktober 31st (Update - SEAMS!)



I hate seams. Hatehatehatehatehatehatehatehatehatehatehate them.

Not sure precisely where my deep seated animosity towards seam lines begins. I've competed in a few IPMS contests, but never been a member, and I know one of their things is to hide your seams. Maybe it starts there? Maybe its from doing terrible Toybiz Marvel kits in my mid-twenties over a decade ago and hating how they joined together, me with my tube of Testors glue and enamel brush paints jars forever distanced by terrible join lines from the amazing version I could see on the box. Whatever the reason, I do crazy stuff to not have seams. I've thrown decent kits in the garbage because of part placements that make seam lines impossible to fill and sand (I'm looking at you, Moebius Iron Man).

OK, vitriol aside, Games Workshop terrain is some of the most plastic you can get for your money if you just want to paint something big. However, they don't have great fits either usually, so some creative licensing has to be done to hide cracks in the buildings, such as this:


I didn't even get that rune-filled brace totally in the shot. That part is even worse than the bricks. If you look in the top right corner of the picture above, you can see the Grand Canyon-sized gap, with I-beam edges and runes, that one has to deal with on this kit. Why people insist on putting joins on textured surfaces, I'll never know. So, what to do? I figured my best bet was to just entirely redo the cinder blocks, one at a time.



I mixed up a batch of Aves Apoxie, put on a bad movie, and started the process up. Those bricks were so tiny, just a sliver of putty was MORE than enough to cover an entire brick. I just applied the putty, got an old brush, and shaped it to size, with the added benefit of being sloppy with the stiffer bristles making texture on the bricks themselves. I'm extremely happy with how the end result turned out.  But my patience could only go so far....


I eventually succumbed to anxiety and just sculpted the base of some ivy over the final corner, to have some scenics added later.

Right above where the bricks were added is some artistic brace with loads of runes on it, that were killing me. There was a GIGANTIC seam down all four corners, IN BETWEEN the runes. I sanded the closest runes to the front, and filled the gap with sheet styrene and trimmed it to fit, then used the science of glue melting the styrene to fill the gap, and sanded the rest down.



On top of that, the corners of the house had a metal "brace" that  was cloven in two by the kit part breakdown (look right above the styrene strip in the above photo), so I sanded those down and replaced with strip styrene and added some rivets:

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