After a long hiatus, I’ve finished a red Swingline replica. You can find it on eBay here:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/201481414203?ssPageName=STRK:MESELX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1555.l2649

The actual stapler on auction is pictured above.

Several weeks back I attended the 2015 Jersey Fest show here in New Jersey. As part of the three day weekend, I registered to take a miniature painting class, taught by Maya at Morland Studios. For the class fee of $65 you got two figures, one of which is the Sybil, Steampunk Lady Bust shown here, multiple bottles of paint, some high quality brushes, and, not least of all, hands-on training and critique by an extraordinary figure painter.

I used to paint a lot of gaming miniatures. While in the Navy they were the only things portable enough for me to take with me to the bases and aboard ship. I was never very good at them, though, as soft modeling (organic shapes and surfaces) has never been my forte’, I’m better suited to the realms of hard modeling (mechanical items). I’ve always wanted to learn to paint realistic skin tones, Continue Reading »

My most recent completion is the Battlestar Valkyrie. A small-ish kit at just under 6 inches long. The intial cleanup of the resin parts took a while to get done, but once completed, the build and painting was fairly straight-forward.

Added to the website HERE.

I finished this one some time ago, and have finally got around to posting it to the Model Building page of the website. You can see it HERE.

I’ve got another build or two that I’ve finished in the past year that have yet to be posted, and another two projects that are nearing completion. Now that I’ve upgraded my computer and got a newer version of Photoshop up and running, I’ll get around to adding them in due time.

There isn’t a lot of surface area to mask on the Nautilus, but some of what there is happens to be quite intricate. For the forward bridge area, the two “gator eyes” looking protrusions, I decided to leave the clear plastic/glass out for better visibility of the small interior that I built.  Continue Reading »

I’ve learned something over the past several days: whatever skill at soldering I once had — gleaned through lessons from my father and repair schools whilst in the Navy — has all been lost. While soldering these simple connections for this model I cursed a lot, burned even more, and even completely cooked an LED from the inside out. I finally got the wiring and lights hooked up and into the model, but it wasn’t a fun process. I either need to practice this skill, or I need to start buying pre-wired lighting kits.

The setup is simple, though, and that probably saved my sanity Continue Reading »

Ten days in Costa Rica and the coldest winter in memory in the north east have slowed my building.  Since I still can’t airbrush a lot (opening the window is NOT an option), I’m still plugging away at other items. I’ve added brass rods through the lower hull that will serve two purposes: to mount the sub to its base, and to provide power into the hull for the lighting.

I also installed the bridge assembly, Continue Reading »

Slow progress as of late. Honestly it’s just been too damn cold to do any building, so I’ve been focusing more on writing. I’ve forced myself to eek out a little progress on Nautilus ever few days, though, and since most of it has been in the hack/cut/destroy department, I’ve made a little headway.

I’m definitely lighting the model. I picked up some LED tape, which is exactly what it sounds like: adhesive backed tape with an LED approximately every three-eights of an Continue Reading »

Being a swanky science-fiction-enabled underwater craft, the Nautilus has a Victorian lounge with large bay windows. The scale of the sub is in question, as I stated before, and the lounge area really brings this to light: the desk along the wall has sets of books that are quite large compared to the built-in book case contents. I’m telling myself the ones on the desk are log books, and thus larger, and the ones on the wall are paperbacks for casual reading. That doesn’t explain why a writing desk dwarfs a pipe organ, though. In retrospect, I should’ve scratch built a smaller replacement writing desk. Oh well, next build.

In the previous post I showed the brass ceiling beams that went in looking all Continue Reading »

The Nautilus from Jules Verne’s “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” is one of those iconic ships of fiction, up there with the star ship Enterprise and the Millenium Falcon. The Nautilus has been rendered many ways, the most recognizable the Disney version from their movie. This is a new interpretation from artist Greg deSantis, which to me is more in line with the vision in the original novel, and the mid-19th century experimental submarines — especially those of the American Civil War — that Verne would have seen, both in person and depicted in the French press.

The plan with this kit is for a quick build. But, isn’t that always the way at the outset? Several of us in the New Jersey Continue Reading »