With my final paper of the semester turned in, I’ve decided to clean up some stories to send out (sent out two this very day) and work on some models. I’m still at it with the USS Weehawken. It seems like I’m just not making any progress. This part of a build always seems like that. You fill, prime, sand, repeat. And repeat. And repeat. One interesting thing that I found was the visual effect in the first photo. The last time I primed I got lazy and just hit the areas I had sanded. The contrast of old and new primer gives a great textured effect. It’s something I’ll be repeating — in a more controlled manner — when I do the final painting, so it’s great to see a preview of what can be accomplished. Now it’s time for me to scribe all of the armor plating lines onto the deck. That will be quite an undertaking, and one I’ve been putting off.

The second photo is of an interior space. I’m opening up the hatches on Weehawken, so I go to the plans and see what’s under these hatches. The after-most lists it as “engineering” and nothing more. Going off of a paper model of the original USS Monitor, I knocked out this quick bit of plastic gibberish. Once it’s painted, weathered, and viewed through the small 1″ X 1″ opening in the deck, it’ll look just fine.

I’m replacing certain parts of the Weehawken kit. This shot is a before and after (well, an in-progress). The turret roof is supplied in a circle of perforated resin. I’m putting a lot of detail in this turret, so I’ll be replacing it with a clear piece of plastic. I’ve used double-sided tape to attach the plastic replacement to the resin original, and now I’m drilling through the resin perforations, using it to transfer the pattern over to the clear part. Tedious.

And finally, this green guy. It’s a white-metal Dungeons and Dragons gaming figure, about 1.5″ tall, and still very much in-progress. I found him while cleaning up a few weeks back and figured he’s a good piece to practice with the Vallejo paints I’ve recently started using (they rock), and it’s a piece I can finish in a relative short period of time. Sometimes it’s good to just finish something, even if it isn’t that big of an undertaking — I guess that’s why I write short stories as well.