Eldon moves in

The 30Squares Media Empire let the lease expire on the HQ, and a new tenant is getting ready to move in.

Looks like they'll have their work cut out for them as it appears the foundation has shifted.

Blogging on hold for a little while

We've been caught up in the storm that hit Ontario on Saturday, and I will be pausing blogging for a little while. We're fine, but there're things to attend to. More later once my modelling and blogging mojo return.

First attempts at birch tree armatures

1st, Weird | 2nd, Getting better | 3rd, Better still

I'm working on birch tree armatures, and I'm finding the biggest hurdle is overcoming my preconceptions about what birch tree trunks look like.

The 1st one I made is not typically birch-like, although I have seen a few in the wild like it. It doesn't have a 'broken ladder' like progression of branches up the trunk, and its foliage looks like a square hat has been placed on top (I temporarily added some poly fibre to get a sense of what it would look like). The bark is made by wrapping the armature with thin strips of duct tape.

The 2nd armature has a few more lower branches in order to take a stab at a broken ladder progression of branches, but it could use even more.

The 3rd one is getting closer to what I'm looking for. I made this trunk by wrapping a bundle of 26 gauge floral wire (the green wire) with some 30 gauge (the steel coloured wire). As I wound the 30 gauge up the trunk I introduced loops, which were later cut open and shaped to make fine branches. This gives a better simulation of the scraggly nature of the branch structure found on many of these trees in the wild, and should give the overall foliage shape a more raggedy, vertically stretched ellipsoid look.

Experimenting continues.

Ramsey's Park Square: Base painting

Over the last few day's I've been applying base colours to the shell. I started on the easy part and painted the interior a flat black to make the walls a little more opaque and to reduce interior reflections.

The bricks are painted with a loose mix of Revell Aqua Color #36137 Reddish brown, and #36162, Mossy Green. The green is maybe no more than 25% of the mix. It's added to partially grey and deepen the reddish brown. Keeping the mixture loose helps create tonal variation along the walls.

The facade was painted from one of my last remaining bottles of Model Master Aged Concrete. I've figured out how to mimic the colour with paints from the Revell Aqua Color line, but I'm sentimentally attached to my Model Master stash and will continue to use it until the hardened, crusty end :-)

Now it's on to adding mortar lines to the brickwork and detail painting to the facade.

1983 Plymouth Turismo: A kitbash?

Our discussion on the 'correct' definition of kitbashing continues. I put forward for your consideration my 1983 Plymouth Turismo, a model of which I built from these two kits:

I don't know if this is a classic kitbash as the two kits used are simply variations on a single car sold by Chrysler. Regardless, I needed parts from both for this project.

This is another model I built sometime around 2005 or 2006 or so. I do recall I built it soon after the Custom Dodge Rampage.

This is the only construction photo I took during the project. The right image in the composite photo is from the car's brochure. Mine had a grey interior, hence my colour choices. The bowling ball carrying case and the hockey stick in the trunk are items from my scrap box. The retracted tonneau cover was scratchbuilt from some styrene.

Whatever Guest of the Crown stamped out that licence plate didn't get the letters and numbers lined up quite right and ...

... decided to go-for-broke on the plate's sibling. I like the fidelity to the prototype I achieved: the left taillight is cracked just like the real thing after a few years on the road.

Is this a kitbash? A kit-mingle? A kit-lance? I'd go with kit-mingle as the goal was to create as accurate a model of a prototype as I could manage, and that meant carefully combining 2 kits to achieve the 1 I wanted.

A wild advertising flyer inserted in the MPC Dodge Omni 024 donor kit