Andy's Pulp misadventures...

[Andy in Germany]

Really like the race car.

Thanks.I'm pretty pleased with her. I'm working on a slightly different vehicle to complement that one for Maximilian style races, which thankfully are possible at a pinch with the 'Pulp Vehicles' rules

[Andy in Germany]

And now for the question that no-one has asked: what has been happening to the steam powered tank?




Firstly it’s gone rusty. This was achieved by the usual method of painting everything rusty brown, spraying matt varnish over the top, then hairspray, and finally the ‘final’ colour. Even using a familiar method you can learn something new however, and on this occasion I learned that if you try and thin semi solid acrylic paint with Ethanol too many times the pigment separates from the carrier in a rather ugly mess.



Having cleaned off the worst of this learning experience I tried to paint the model a rather nondescript blue/grey. The idea was to make it look like the tank could belong to the British Navy, but not make it too obvious in case some other dastardly cad needed a steam powered death trap in a hurry.

HZG_ST_29 by Andy in Germany, on Flickr

I’m not that convinced by the results thus far: it looks too dark and there’s no sparkle. I realise that a tank shouldn’t have bling and chrome trimming, but I think it needs something to lift it, possibly starting with a completely different colour.

At the moment I think this would be a better finish:



Any thoughts welcome…

[FramFramson]

Holy moly that tank is absolutely MAGNIFICENT and about as pulpy as it can get.

[Andy in Germany]

Holy moly that tank is absolutely MAGNIFICENT and about as pulpy as it can get.

Thank you. I'm going to try and squeeze a bit more pulpiness out of it before I'm done though.

Part of the plan with this tank was to try out the 'hairspray' method, so this morning I soaked the tank and then attacked with a toothbrush:





Now I know what to do when I want a vehicle to look really wrecked. I probably should have been a bit less aggressive with the toothbrush..

I'm not sure what to do next to be honest. I can fix the bits that broke off in the frenzied brushing, but I'm not sure what to do with the rest: I want the tank to look battered but usable, not scrapped.t the moment I'm thinking in terms of priming the bits where I went through to plastic, then repainting the whole model the same colour as I used for the old railcar in the previous post.

[roadskare63]

Absolutely INGENIOUS use of cardboard!!....BRAVO!!.....lovely paint jobs as well...

[Panama]

A great way of recycling, for the tank it might be better to paint it the colour you want it to be then use weathering to make it look used, that tram is ace btw

[Andy in Germany]

Thanks for the kind comments. I've just been told that tomorrow enough family members will be out that I can use the obnoxious primer on the tank...

[Andy in Germany]

As observed recently, I’m rather better at starting a project than finishing it, so you can imagine the excitement this week when the Steam Powered Tank was finally completed.



Part of the problem was that the generic blue/grey I’d used looked more ‘Teutonic’ than ‘generic’ as intended. I also forgot that with a dark topcoat the underlying ‘rust’ didn’t contrast very well. On the other hand I found the Hairspray method used with an old toothbrush is startlingly effective, rather too effective in fact.

So, once again, it was back to the primer, ‘rust’ layer, varnish, hairspray; and after completely overthinking things as usual, a sandy green topcoat. I rubbed this off with a paintbrush this time to avoid great slabs of rust, then completely failed to ‘ink’ the cracks with black ink, as usual.



The Boiler end would probably be filthy from clearing out the ash, so this got a scumbling of black, then a very light drybrushing of white and silver in an attempt to make the milk bottle cap look like it was made of metal. The worst mistakes made so far were covered by several shades of pastel powders for general road dirt, and as an experiment I rubbed a soft pencil on some of the exposed ‘metal’ surfaces.



I’m still wondering if I should add brass on some of the pipes: on the one hand it seems silly because that would ruin the ‘camouflage’ effect but I’ve never let logic stop me before…

[von Lucky]

Leave it - it looks great!

[tom q vaxy]

nice patina; looks just right.

[Jerm]

Nice painting/weathering indeed

[General]

Looks groovey!

[FramFramson]

Bloody good end to this project - looks just right now!

[Andy in Germany]

Thanks again for the positive comments...

I recently asked elsewhere about a figure to pilot a monowheel, and having done so, realised that I hadn't put any pictures of this vehicle yet.


A while back, Tin Shed Gamer said that you can make almost any kind of model out of card, at the same time as making a rather spiffy monowheel, out of whitemetal, so I decided to try the theory out.



I may have turned up the Bonkers Factor in my version.

To start with I made the circle of card seen above, started with one strip around an old aerosol can lid stuck down with a bit of masking tape, then added two more pieces to make it solid. This is what passes for technology on my workbench.



Next step was to make a rather rough tread, which I’m sure will look fine once it’s painted and weathered and viewed from a distance. Quite a considerable distance admittedly. It probably looks worse to Frederick.



Then I added an equally rough ‘gear’ or possibly ‘rack?’ on the inside of the wheel, which took a bit of fiddling about with superglue to stop the layers from separating. I need to find a better way to do this. I’m told Shellac is the stuff.

‘Colonel’ Oliver is taking an interest, which is Probably a bad sign. Frederick remains unimpressed.



The crowning loopiness so far is the drive unit, which is gradually taking shape. I have a sneaking suspicion that switched on it would rotate inside the outer wheel while producing absolutely no forward motion whatsoever, but we’ll ignore that.

This is also the source of the problem about the driver: Normally the driver would straddle the motor on a monowheel, but on this Behemoth they'll have to be to one side to make space for all the gubbins in the middle, needed because this is a steam powered monowheel, obviously,  so I'll have to think a bit about how I make that happen...

More silliness will undoubtedly follow, but hopefully I’ve now broken the model making block and can get on with some more ‘serious’ models…

[tin shed gamer]

  looking good.
Drop me a pm. And send you the monowheel rider as its pose should work nicely
Mark.