“Boldly Going…Again!”

The Enterprise is finished.

Well, Dear Reader. It’s been a while. Time to get back on the horse. Lets get to it!

So welcome back once again with a look at the finished U.S.S. Enterprise as she appeared in the second series of Star Trek: Discovery. It’s been a while now, but if you remember, I spoke about this kit way back in the post ‘Boldly Going…‘ where I took a look at the kit in it’s disassembled form.

A few weeks back, I had finished this marvelous kit. This is the first time where I’ve completed a Star Trek kit and not felt like I wanted a second shot at it. And it has been an interesting learning curve, there are things I would have done differently especially in decaling the warp nacelles, but I’ll come onto that in a moment. This kits biggest success for me was in it’s simplicity, and i don’t mean that in sense that its a snap fit kit, but this is a kit I can easily recommend for new builders. with the kit being molded in the the colour it needs to be, you don’t need to have model making skills to make this look great, you’d need to colour the clear pieces and the deflector dish, but that’s it. You can afford to be bold with the decals they’re nice, sturdy and forgiving and finish the ship off perfectly, you just need a little patience and you’ll do well with them.

As you can see in the pictures, I elected to paint my copy of the model (You can find the colours I used in the previous post about this kit), and overall, I like it. I do sometimes look at it and wonder ‘should I have used Steel rather than Dark Steel as the base colour’, I do look at it and think it’s too dark, but then I think it fits quite well with Discovery’s tone and colour palette, plus, the white of the paint and decals and the the other lighter colours pop against the darker base.

Now, in the big picture of things, my thoughts are largely positive. There was something I did notice in regards to the port side nacelle pylon.

It’s not easy to see here, but the port nacelle hangs a little lower that the Starboard one. At first I thought I had the saucer section just mis-positioned ever so slightly. But no, that was fine. I feel like this is something I did wrong, though what that was isn’t clear. The piece fixes perfectly into where it sits on the engineering section and there is no visible warps in the part. It’s the one thing that lets an otherwise perfect kit down.

Also, in regards to the engines, the decals were a struggle to lay down. As I assembled the nacelles I attached the four fin parts before painting. Now, if you remember back to my original post I mentioned that a slight molding issue meant there was a gap between the part and one of its connector pegs on one of those aforementioned fin parts, as if a small bubble popped in the process during the kits creation. Well, I glued that down only to discover that the decals should have gone on first before those parts. I had to do a little selective trimming and Micro Sol was very much my friend. But, if I was to have another go at this one again, I would have done the decals first then use canopy glue to stick the fins down.

There was only eight smaller detail decals that I didn’t use, these were four that covered the deflector housing behind the deflector dish and eight little details that sat towards the front of the warp nacelles. These were really fiddly and I couldn’t get them to sit well. Thankfully, their omission from the build hasn’t harmed the final look.

I had a a couple of decal misplacements on the saucer section, but otherwise I’m really happy with how this kit turned out. Polar Lights have done a really good job with these Star Trek: Discovery kits and I’m looking forward to a second attempt at the Discovery itself and the Shenzhou. Lets hope we get more kits from the Discovery series later down the line.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this post. I recently went back into my Pinterest account and had an idea. Originally I had in mind of having a gallery tab so that you could see more of the models I’ve built, but I’m conscious of filling up space I have on WordPress for photo’s at the moment. Once I’ve figured what the best way is to use Pinterest for this, I’ll start directing you there for more photo’s.

It’s Halloween this week and I have something in mind to talk about in the next post, in fact I’m watching part of what I’m talking about as I write this. So, until next time, I’ll see you soon, and I won’t leave it as long this time.

‘An Overdue Catch-up’.

A picture of my hometown…just because.

It’s been a while, Dear Reader, or at least a week. I missed last week, simply because I didn’t feel up to. With the current world situation, my anxiety over it kind of got the better of me a bit, and I put off doing a post because I didn’t feel up to it. This one should have been a bank holiday bonus last week, but alas, it didn’t happen.

So this is just a brief one to get back into the blogging stride again and give a little update on my end.

One of the things that I have been up to is online learning through a company call ‘Center of Excellence‘ they have a load of good courses on offer. However, I think I’ve over faced myself with courses. I have eight or nine on the go, but one has been a main focus and that is Affiliate Marketing. I’m going to talk about this one in more depth in a future post, but I’ve been thinking about this one a lot and I’ve done a lot of research. I’m now asking myself, is it for me? I continue to study but doing these courses, the day job, the blog and trying to fit my other writing in had kind of burnt me out over the last couple of weeks.

Though that burn out happened and I took a break from all but the day job (can’t just drop that), I did continue with the model making. The Enterprise from ‘Star Trek: Discovery’ is done and I’m going to write about that in the next post.

Good news, if you remember back to my post ‘In The Face Of Adversity‘ you’ll remember how I told the tale of how I had two airbrushes break and lost a piece of the ‘Moon Gundam’ kit. I told you how I solved the issue with the airbrushes. Well, I was able to find the missing part of kit. It must have got caught up on my clothes as I found it next to my bed about a two weeks later. I’m so glad I didn’t throw the kit away.

That’s it for now, Dear Reader. I hope you are keeping well and keeping safe. As always, take care and I’ll see you soon.

‘In The Face Of Adversity…’

Gone! The Moon Gundam is heading to the scrap heap in the sky!

Dear Reader! A disaster has befallen the Moon Gundam model I was building. And, I had two airbrush related mishaps, but that was rectified fairly easily. Let me explain further.

So the build was going well on the Moon Gundam, and I was having a great time painting it I was really happy with airbrushing, I think I’m getting the hang of it now. After completing both legs I made a start on the waist unit. I clipped all the pieces off the frames before calling it a day that evening and came back to it the next day. As I was preparing the pieces for painting I noticed a piece had disappeared. I looked high and low, all around my work space and nothing! Sadly, it was an important piece in the kit. It was the piece connects the torso to the waist.

I still have a fools hope that the piece will appear and have put the rest of the kit has been put away, but we’re about a week at this point since the part vanished. I think the kit is done.

On to the airbrush incidents! I had two issues with two separate airbrushes. On the one that I’ve become really used to using, a seal that sits behind the nozzle snapped. I thought I could get away with it but sadly, It just started to bubble where the seal should have been. So, I resolved this by pulling out an older airbrush. It was actually my first one, that I never used. I used it to start the Enterprise kit (you can read my out of box look at this here) over Sunday and Monday. Disaster struck again, Tuesday morning. After leaving some of the parts to soak over night to clean the airbrush, I noticed that the ‘inner nozzle’ (the small part that houses the sharp end of the needle) was pointing down slightly. On investigating, the thread that screws into the main body of the airbrush had sheared off. I was gobsmacked! Two airbrushed gone in a few days.

However, I suddenly had a flash of inspiration, I decided to cannibalise the broken airbrush and used some parts on the one that I had gotten used too. All was not lost. I took a seal and the needle and used them on the other airbrush. And all was right in my model making world.

It got me thinking about facing adversity in life in general and it became a bit of a metaphor. If you have a problem, do you face it head on or admit defeat? I like to think that in general we face issues head on and find solutions. I know this is depends on the situation. but where there is a problem there is a solution.

Well, I think that’s it for now. The next post is going to be an experimental one, but I’ll explain a bit more at that time. I’ve also started to do some research to do a piece on an Youtube web series that I think could be quite interesting. For now, take care, keep safe and I’ll see you soon.

“Boldly Going…”

The box art.

Hello once again, Dear Reader. We are back once again in this new era of my blog. So thank you for joining me. Today we stepping into the world of model making once more. We’re going to boldly go where many modellers have gone before at this point, and exploring strange new worlds with 1/2500 U.S.S. Enterprise by Polar Lights as seen in ‘Star Trek: Discovery’ and soon to be seen again in the recently announced ‘Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’. Let’s take a look inside the box.

So when you dive into the box you are presented with four frames of parts, three of which are moulded in a gunmetal colour and one frame of clear parts. You’ll also get two sheets of decals that have all the idents and registry’s for the ship and a full set of Aztec wallpaper to detail the model. I do have a plan for painting, but well come back to that in a bit. Let’s look at the parts…

The parts for the main body of the ship.

As mentioned, three frames of parts are moulded in gunmetal so you already get an idea of what it can look like colour wise when finished and it’s surprisingly well detailed. There are parts of the ship like on the outer part of the warp engines and on the side of the secondary hull where some of the detail can be painted rather than use the decals. When I first opened the box I was surprised how much surface detail there was. On mine though I found a potential fault with the injection moulding on one of the four ‘fins’ in the top right corner of the bottom frame, there was a gap between the part and one of its connection pegs, as I say, it could be a case of a slight hiccup in the moulding process or it’s just been treated a little too heavy handed when it was being packed. Even though this is a snap fit kit, this shouldn’t cause to much of an issue depending on how I paint the part, whether it’s painted separately or as a bigger assembly, it’ll be either a drop of liquid cement or canopy glue to secure it.

The clear parts and the display stand.

The inclusion of clear parts are quite interesting, this gives the option of lighting. I know, it seems impossible on a kit at this size, but if you check out the ‘All Scale Trek’ YouTube channel you’ll see it’s possible and it turns out quite well. Now, we’re going to dip into a bit of my build process thinking now in regards to the display stand. A little while ago I bought a couple of sheets of adhesive felt. I had a plan to use this on a display base before but didn’t do it at that time (it was actually my first attempt with the Discovery kit before that went wrong). I bought a resin set, one of those with the double syringe by the ‘Gorilla’ brand. So, what I want to do is fill the underside of the main part of the base with the resin, sand it down so it’s flat and then attach the adhesive felt. It’s something you find on a lot of ornaments and Eaglemoss use it on their display stands for their ‘Star Trek’ and ‘Battlestar Galactica’ models. We’ll see how that turns out. Now, on to the decals…

The decal sheets.

Here are the decal sheets. If they are anything like the Discovery’s decals, they will be nice to apply, the only areas that could cause me an issue are the ones that will go along the edge of the saucer section and on the secondary hull. Ive heard a few reports saying that the secondary hull decals are the ones that have caused an issue when they have been applied. I an way off that stage yet. I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it. However, before the decals there is the paint…

The paints I’ll be using.

To start off with, I’ll be priming the kit with both a black and a white primer, the black for the gunmetal parts and white for the clear parts. The Bussard collectors on the front of the warp nacelles and the warp grills for the inner side of warp nacelles will be Red from the Vallejo Model Air range and Electric Blue from the Vallejo Game Colour range respectively. The latter of the two will end to be thinned down to go through the air brush.

As for the body of the ship itself I had a bit of a quandary of that. At first, I had an idea of doing a two tone metallic colour, then I decided just to stick to the colour scheme suggested by the box, I really liked using the Gunmetal colour from Vallejo’s Mecha Colour range on my Moon Gundam kit (I’m going to talk about that in the next blog post, it’s bad news) so I would have been happy using that on its own. Having said that, I started drifting back into my previous idea of doing a two tone colour scheme. I had three versions of ‘Steel’ from the same line as the Gunmetal colour. Here are my results…

I delved into the world of spoons!

Now, I know what you’re thinking, Dear Reader, “but James, this is awe fully organised of you!” I know, I’m just as surprised as you that I’ve actually got a plan in place. These has been created with a base of Gunmetal and from left to right I’ve used Light Steel, Steel and Dark Steel. My favourite and what my final colour will be is the Dark Steel and Gunmetal. The two really compliment each other really well and create a nice subtle contrast where the lighter steel colours have a harsher contrast with the Gunmetal. The Dark Steel also has a nice warmth to it. It’ll be the Dark Steel as the main colour of the ship, and using the Gunmetal for the end caps on the nacelles and on the deflector grousing that sits at the front of the secondary hull. In keeping with the darker colour scheme, I’m also going to use copper for the deflector dish. Not pictured with the other paints, is black and white. The black will be for the display base and white will be for the clear parts in the saucer section. To finish off, to apply the decals, I’ll be using a gloss varnish and once they are applied, a final satin varnish will be used to finish the ship off.

The box art reprised.

And there we have it, a look at the 1/2500 Enterprise kit. If I had one criticism about it, its with the price. Now I don’t blame the seller for the pricing, it was a British seller on eBay that I bought this from. but I’ve been hearing this is really a twenty dollar kit in America, but it’s suddenly between forty five to fifty pound over here. I believe that Amerang are still the distributors of Star Trek kits over in the UK that I hope that the pricing is something that can be looked at. I also hope that I can get this completed on my first attempt, ever since I was nowt but a lad I’ve always had to take at least two attempts with Star Trek kits, but we’ll wait and see. If it does go wrong, It’ll be the decals that may turn into a disaster.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this one, next one will still be a model making themed post, but there’ll be a twist so I hope you’ll come back for the mid week post. As always, Dear Reader. Keep safe and I’ll see you soon.

‘Model Matters.’

Hello, Dear Reader and welcome back. Today, we’re going to have another peaceful one, another calmer one like Tuesday. It’s a bit of an update my model making at the moment. So lets take a look where we are so far.

I’ve completed the Andromeda model, the first from the ‘AAA-Class’ boxed set from Bandai. Here it is below:

The completed Andromeda!

I’m going to look a bit more indepth at the kit when I’ve built one of the two variants that’s included in the box. I think it took me in total about two weeks to complete and it was the first time I’ve predominantly used an airbrush. I have to say, I think I’m a convert. Brushes still have a place though, the light brown decking, the bone white parts and the four thrusters at the back of the ship were all hand painted. There is around twenty five parts and they all fit perfectly, it’s just a wonderful kit and I’m looking forward to building it’s other four sister ships.

And so as one kit is completed another one begins! And sticking with Bandai kits, this time it’s a Gundam kit.

The Moon Gundam box art.

This is the Moon Gundam from the High Grade Universal Century line. This exists in the same continuity as the original ‘Modile Suit Gundam’ series and is based on the Sazarbi as seen in the movie ‘Char’s Counter-attack’. I’m looking forward to building this one, it’s going to be interesting especially with the crescent mounted on the back. I do have a plan on how to paint it. I recently acquired metallic paints from Vallejo’s Mecha Colour range, these paints are formulated to be resistant to scratches which, if true, will be great for the articulation and it’s also for airbrushes. I’m thinking that the majority of the kit is going to be all airbrushed using metallics, the only exception will be the the eye piece.

Over the course of the last week I have started the kit just about completing the torso as seen in the picture below:

I started with Vallejo’s Gloss Black Primer over each part, after two coats and drying time, I used the Mecha Colour paints (copper, gold, gunmetal and metallic blue) which was followed with Vallejo’s Mecha Colour Gloss varnish to seal it before the final construction and so far, so good the paint held up to the pressure of snapping the parts together so I think this is going to turn out really well.

Well that’s going to bring to a close this post. This might be the last model making focused post for a while as there are so many pieces to this kit to paint and put together, so it’ll take me a while to do. But, that just means we’ll get to take a look at other things as we go forward.

As always, Dear Reader. Take care and keep Safe, I’ll see you next week.

Stepping into Airbrushing!

Hello and welcome once again, Dear Reader. If you’re a regular reader you will already know that I like to build model kits and when it comes to the painting aspect of model making, I’ve always been a hand painter. However, recently I’ve dipped my toe into the world of airbrushing.

I took a good chunk of time off from model making, that was a span of practically all my twenties and into my thirties. When I was building originally, I started on a diet of Star Trek kits, and later into my teens, I was building Warhammer 40,000 miniatures. Back then it was all brush painting, doing it all by hand. I would spend ages painting various Enterprise’s tweaking the colour scheme to my liking, and building Deep Space Nine as well as other kits from AMT Ertl’s (as it was then) range of Trek kits. I’ve always found it quite calming spending the time carefully applying the paint as smoothly as I could. It would take time, but I never minded, I was in my happy place building, creating.

The years rolled by and eventually I discovered Youtube and within the confines of cat videos and twenty something’s daily vlogs, I found model making channel. I was in my element and I absorbed the content these creators were making with their build logs and they all had one thing in common, airbrushes. I thought it was a fascinating concept and, of course, it made sense. Car painters would have been using something similar for years, and cars are kind of like model kits.

A few more years went by and I finally bit the bullet and bought an airbrush and compressor kit, the one in the picture above. It probably won’t win the best set in the world award but it does the job. Saying that, it was a good year before I used it and the first time I actually used it was only a few weeks back at the time of writing this post. Now, I have to admit I don’t know what brand either part is. There was nothing on the box it came in, nor was there anything on the instructions. I couldn’t even tell you what model the airbrush or the compressor is. What I can tell you is that I bought it on ebay for around £35.

It’s taken some getting used to and figuring out how to set it up was done more on guess work as the instructions were useless. But as i use it more part of me is thinking “why didn’t I get one sooner!” Its been great to use and the paint settles nicely. My biggest fear was the cleaning of it, the videos I watched always seemed to make it look difficult, which at the end of the day, it really isn’t. I do use Vallejo Airbrush Cleaner, it does an excellent job, however, I think I maybe use a little too much as I seem to be going through the bottle I have quickly.

In the above picture is a selections of the paints I’ve acquired for the airbrush, I’m probably going to use a mix of Model Air and Game Air for the majority of the kits I build but I’m in the process of getting more of the Mecha Colour paints. These are interesting because they are formulated for use on Gundam kits so that they are as scratch resistant as they can be for joints on those kits. I really like the Metal Colour paints they look great in conjunction with the Metal varnish. I’ve also gotten to really like the Aqua Gloss Clear varnish from Alclad ii (the version pictured is the Mig Jimenez version that they sell through a license from Alclad). this leaves a very nice finish and is water based. Its also great for an ink based product called Molotow Liquid Chrome as a varnish to seal that as the chrome finish is quite fragile.

I’m using my airbrush for the first time properly on my Andromeda kit as seen below.

I’m not going to spend much time on this kit now, I spoken about it a lot recently in other posts. What I will say is that it has been a learning curve. I discovered that even though you can use airbrush paints neat, its still a good idea to thin them – I have flow improver for that – and even then some airbrush paints need thinning a bit more than others, it also has the advantage of being able apply paint quickly and efficiently. But I am also thinking what other things I can apply it too.

As we’ve been in lock down, I’ve ended up with a craving to paint, not just models, but to actually get a canvas and paint something. I haven’t had that feeling since college over twenty years ago and I’m curious to see how to apply an airbrush to the discipline of fine art. with the colour shifting paints that are available as well as inks, I think the possibilities are endless.

I don’t think it will totally replace my brushes, I’ll still need them for detail work, but for tasks like priming, base coating and varnishing, the airbrush is quickly becoming an invaluable tool at my disposal and I’m looking forward to exploring what I can do with it in the time to come.

So that’s it for now. If you liked my post about Dorian Deathly’s Tales from the Fireside the other week, there is another episode this Sunday, so if you have a Facebook account just pop ‘Dorian Deathly’s Deathly Dark Tours’ in to the search box and go check out tours and tales of the paranormal in and around York.

Keep safe and I’ll see you next time.

An Addendum, An update, And Some Other Things…

Hello, Dear Reader, here we are on a Sunday. It’s gloomy here in Scarborough, we’ve had a few nice weeks of sunshine, but now the rain is falling. A good thing for plants and the ground they say, and probably good weather for blogging too. This little addition isn’t so much a proper post ,but a little extra because there was a couple of things I wanted to share that was connected to Thursday’s post. It didn’t seem enough on their own to really qualify a full post, so I thought I would expand it a little and show you a couple of my other projects that I have that are on hold at the moment so lets start of with the addendum to Thursday.

So, I’ve now officially started the Andromeda from the five piece boxset. I did decide to paint the display stand and bring it in line with the other kits of the range, and this is the first time that I’ve used an airbrush to paint, I’ll come on to my adventure in to airbrushing another time. But, I will say so far so good, some touch ups are needed then I can do a gloss coat to add the panel lines then I can put it together and add decals.

After the post on Thursday, I ended up looking closely at the Neu Balgray version of the Andromeda kit, at first I thought it was simply the same kit molded in a different colour, but then I spotted these two extra parts in the bag with the display stand. So it’s going to be interesting to see how these fit on the kit and what they are for when I get around to building it.

Now, an update on the Arcadia. It’s nearly done barring one final gun turret. Having said that, I’ve had a couple of issues with it that are all my own fault. The decals went on well but it was my own impatience that ended up wrecking a load of them. they seemed to want to stick to me more than the kit and I should have kept that in mind and not rush to get them on. The port side skull and crossbones went wrong as well. I couldn’t get the piece to fit into place, so it’s raised if the main body of the ship. But it didn’t stop there. In trying to get the skull into place, it snapped at its thinnest part of the piece which was the outer eye socket. I’m a bit gutted as I had good traction with the kit and feel like I’ve fallen at the final hurdle.

Anyway, moving on. I’m going to show you two of my works in progress that have ended up on a prolonged hiatus.

This one is from the Super Sentai series Ryusoulger, which will form the basis of next years Power Rangers Dino Fury. Its a Mini-pla and in total has eight packs in the set, these are normally sold in supermarkets and other shops like this in Japan. Three packs make up the red T-rex and the others are the other mecha from the series. So Far, this is what I have completed. Its hand painted using Vallejo metallic paints and Citadel’s Contrast paints. It’s a snap fit kit and from what I’ve learnt, these Mini-pla kits work in the same way as there bigger DX counterparts. they don’t have electronics like the bigger versions, but they do have articulation which the bigger versions don’t.

I called this the Wing Zero Honoo Dark Gundam. it was meant to be an evil version of the Wing Zero Honoo from the Build Fighter’s spin off manga Gundam Build Fighter’s Honoo. I bought two of the special parts frame for this kit that came out as part of a magazine. I’ve used parts of those extra parts on the head. this was painted by hand and with Vallejo paints as well. looking at it now after all this time away from it, there are things I’m not happy about the paint has scratched off in places and paint has thickened nubs on parts making them unmovable. On the plus side, I do like the colour scheme. I’d really like to come back to this one, now I’m getting used to using an airbrush. I don’t know if I’d continue with this one, or get a new kit and start again. Time will tell.

Anyway, that’s it for the moment. Normal service will resume on Tuesday, so I’ll see you then.

‘To The Sky You Gaze Upon…’

And we’re back with the Thursday post and it’s a model making one again. No delays this this time around. I was actually prepared this time… I know, I’m shocked too! Anyway, we’re going to delve into the world of Space Battleship Yamato, specifically the more recent remake of the series of 2199 and 2202 and the movie spin off Odyssey of The Celestial Ark. What I’m going to look at today is the Andromeda fleet from the second series. So hope aboard, we’re off to outerspace.

As we enter the 2202 (season two) series of the show, the crew of the Yamato has been back home from their legendary trip to collect the Cosmic Reverse technology, which they used to help repair and rebuild the earth after the war with the Gamillians. humanity began to rebuild the Cosmic Navy with the first ship to role of the production line being the Space Battleship Andromeda. The first release of this kit was back in 2017 by Bandai and was branded as number 1 in the Mecha Collection line, with, surprisingly, the Yamato itself being number 2, and would see a further three releases with a fourth due in September. I never got the single release of the Andromeda or the Apollo Norm as Bandai released the ‘U.N.C.F. AAA-Class Set which included the aforementioned models with three other ships in one box (being numbered as set number 7). the advantage that this set has over the single releases was that it comes with water slide decals rather than stickers, which is quite handy as stickers aren’t really helpful if you’re painting your models. Now with out further a do, lets have a look at the contents.

I’m not going to show you the full contents as it is literally the above picture with another three frames of the same ship parts, so it gives you a good idea of whats in the boxes. What is interesting is that I discovered that for the carrier parts (the four smaller ‘B’ frames) to be attached you swap out the bridge tower for these. Once I figured that out, I realized how versitile the kits were, of course I haven’t built the Apollo Norm or the other carrier variant of the Andromeda yet so how they fit together could be another story. the kits have their own individual display stands. These have been a bit of a divergence from the other kits in this line as they are cast in a clear plastic rather than black, I have a feeling that this was meant to be a special set rather than a regular numbered set and I think that’s why they are in clear. However, that does raise the question, Am I going to paint them or leave them. I’ll be using the name plates from the side of the box either way, but do I want to keep them unique or do I want them to be uniform with the other kits. I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.

Now, It’s not the best picture, but the set also comes with this display stage. It’s a transparent dark blue plastic piece with metalillic flakes. The five ships will all sit on top of this, it’s a nice way to simulate the idea of space, it could be why the display stands are clear plastic come to think of it. Although, there is no way to have kits secured to the stage so if the bigger base gets knocked the ships could fly off, course unknown. I may be mis-remembering, but I seem to think I read or heard somewhere that this was going to be a limited time addition to this set and would be available to buy separately, if that’s correct, then you do have a nice display stage for your SH Figuarts figures or your Figure Rise Standard figure kits with having the two levels for display, I’ll have to test that myself actually, if it works that would be a good investment for displays in the future.

The instruction for the five piece set come on an A4 sized sheet which is unusual for this line as normally the instructions are printed on the inside of the box lid. I think this is the normal practice to do this rather than spend that money on a separate sheet of paper. I’ve noticed this on Bandai’s Mini-pla kits as well. They are clear and easy to follow and for things like colour guides you do have all the box art itself to find that.

The kit comes with a tiny set of decals, for the majority of these it looks like they’ll be fine to apply, but there are some tiny ones so there is potential that they could head into scary territory like the Ginga ones did, We’ll just have to wait and see.

Overall, these are nice sets and if they are anything like the other Yamato kits I’ve build they’ll be great little builds. I bought mine from Hobbylink Japan so go and and take a look if you’re interested.

So there we have it a look in the box of the Andromeda and her sister ships I’m looking forward to getting on with these and as a plan of attack I may space these out rather than build them all in one go, it could get a little too repetitive building essentially the same kit with more or less the same colour scheme, the Neu Balgray, pictured in the picture at the top does have a very different colour scheme so that variant will be fun to do. As I mentioned near the start, there is another version of this kit out in September, which is an unmanned drone ship in darker colours. so I do have a idea to get a couple of those and create a small drone fleet. We’ll just have to wait and see if that comes to fruition, I have accrued a bit of a back log of kits at the moment. Anyway, that’s it for now have a nice weekend and I’ll see you back here on Tuesday.

‘All I ask is a Tall Ship And A Star To Steer Her By’

It’s a very grand title for this one, I know. The line itself is taken from John Masefield’s poem ‘Sea-Fever’ and for those of you dear readers who are Star Trek fans will remember it being said a few times throughout the franchise’s history, it was even used the the quote on the dedication plaque of the U.S.S. Defiant from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (I’ve just shown another level of my geekness with that haven’t I!). So I think it’s a fitting title to share with you some models I’ve built in recent times. So come aboard, and lets set sail to the stars.

Now, there are only four to share at this time, the other completed kit is a Gundam kit, and I think they are worthy of their own post for later down the line. I also have a few that I’ve started but haven’t finished. I may do a work in progress post for those. As this blog is helping me get back into a regular routine for writing, hopefully, it will also help get those kits finished. These are only going to be light reviews if that, so at this point I will say that they are all painted using Acrylicos Vallejo paints, barring the phaser arrays on the Enterprise-D which were painted in ‘Dark Bronze’ by Green Stuff World. let’s take a look at the models.

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We’re starting with the U.S.S. Enterprise – D from ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation’ and ‘Star Trek: Generations’. This is a 1:2500 model kit from AMT (owned by Round 2 Models) and marks my fourth attempt with this kit, it’s only a few years younger than myself and the first time I built it would have been either the very late 80’s or very early 90’s. I do have some very fond memories of it, and this version has a nice looking set of decals that cover the surface and comes with a much better base that it had as part of the original ‘Three Piece Enterprise Set’. Once built, it is a nice model that looks good. As I say I have such fond memories building and painting the previous versions. But, it does pain me to say, that at this point, I think this fine ship deserves an update. On the box, it states it’s a snap fit kit. It isn’t. It was never designed to be, and because of the ‘tweaks’ to attempt to make it snap fit, it has created a fit issue between the saucer and neck section with the star drive section. which is a real shame. It’s also only nine pieces to make the ship, which isn’t an issue as such, It’s just such an old model that doesn’t fit with some of it’s contemporary’s that Round 2 have made recently and the price was an issue for me to, back in the day for the full three piece set it cost around the twenty pound mark, I paid quite a bit more just for this alone. The Decals don’t quite fit either, they feel like they were made for a different kit and felt quite thin and a couple had a tendency to tear. But with those faults aside it still looks a fine ship when finished.

Now, this is the first of two kits from the same series. This is the space battleship Yamato from ‘Space Battleship Yamato’ specifically the ‘2202’ version from the shows second series. If you can find it, I highly recommend this show (they just had different years at the end of the title the first series was ‘2199’ and series two had ‘2202’) and this is from Bandai’s ‘Mecha Colle’ line of model kits. They are small but pack a lot of detail. The boxes aren’t that much bigger than a twenty pound note, and are only a few inches long in this particular kit there were 3 sprues of parts one for the stand and the other two was the parts for the ship itself. There’s twenty five parts and its build around an inner structure piece. It is also snap fit and molded in grey and red, I painted mine but I can highly recommend these as a starter kit for those who want to have ago at model making, they even have name plates that you can cut from the box and stick to the stands. These kits are such a joy, and even with shipping (bear in mind I’ve imported this from Japan) one kit will cost a little over a fiver. Putting shipping aside for one moment this cost me all of £3.81 and for the other ‘2202’ era kits, that’s the starting price as you can get sets of ships and bigger ships, which obviously cost a bit more. The ‘2199’ era ships are all in the same size box and they’re £2.54 each. I got mine from Hobby Link Japan, and if you do go and take a look, Bandai’s Mecha Colle line isn’t exclusive to the Yamato models.

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Now, I know what your thinking; ‘You’ve uploaded the same picture!’ And on the surface, yes, I can see where you’re coming from. But no, it’s another ship, let me introduce you to ‘The Experimental Ship of Transcendental Dimension Ginga’…yep, that’s it’s name! Apart from the mouthful of a name, The Ginga is based on the Yamato mentioned above. As far as I’m aware this is a brand new ship exclusive to the modern series and first seen in the second series (‘2202’). I haven’t seen the original anime from the 70’s/80’s so I don’t know if it has been featured before. this had a slew of new parts made for it and features a landing deck at the top behind a new bridge module and the dome like recreation deck (the big blue bit). I would run the risk of repeating what I said above about the Yamato, these are just great kits. The only issue I had was the front nose of the ship. Mine wouldn’t fit flush to the ship so there is a gap that makes it look ever so slightly separate from the rest of the hull. Now this is a latter kit in the ‘2202’ line which means it has water slide decals rather than stickers. They are nice, but small, one is so small it was scary to apply and I don’t think I’ve ever held my breath so long to apply it. Even though the Ginga came in the same size box, it does cost a little more than the Yamato, this one costs £4.44 before shipping. But, do you know what, with the parts count and the detail at this small size, it’s great value.

Last one to share for now is the ‘good old lady’ herself. The Galactica. From Ronald D. Moore’s reboot of ‘Battlestar Galactica’ from 2003, this was such an amazing series, go and give it a look, this is my favorite of my builds so far, and the one I’m most proud of. It took me a while to complete this one as I procrastinated over it for a few years. It’s in 1:4105 scale and is oddly dwarfed by the 1:2500 Enterprise-D kit. It has a interesting story, when I bought this it was in a Revell branded box, but I found out that this was originally made by ‘Moebius Models’. How did i discover this? Well, Revell didn’t take Moebius’ logo and company name off the display stand. At first, I thought that was a bit lazy, but I also got excited as it was around this time that Moebius announced a kit of the Pegasus in the same scale. Revell had released the Viper’s mark 2 and 7, a Cylon Raider and a Cylon Warrior. Unfortunately, my dream of having ‘The Beast’ and ‘The Bucket’ (if you’re a Galactica fan, you know) side by side was dashed. Revell had no plans to reissue the Pegasus under their banner, and ebay prices for the bigger kit now isn’t exactly wallet friendly. One day, I will fulfill this dream. At the time of purchase, the Revell version set me back no more than twenty pounds, and it is a great kit. My only issue is the gator head front section. It doesn’t fit quite right to the main body and makes the ship look like it’s looking up, but that doesn’t spoil the majesty and impressiveness (if that’s even a word) that this ship commands. Of course, my idea to have a small fleet of Battlestars isn’t quite squashed. On the Galactica, I used brass-etched parts from a third party company called ‘Paragrafix’. This was mainly with the ship name and registry on both flight pods. On that frame of brass-etch parts was a selection of other ship names. But, there was one specific name that made me want to do another version of this kit. That name: Columbia, this was seen briefly in a flash back sequence in the Battlestar Galactica TV movie ‘Razor’ (and mentioned briefly in the original series too). Hopefully, I can find another Galactica kit at a reasonable price and I can make the Columbia happen.

Well, there we go. That’s my completed models so far. I’m not that far away from adding the Arcadia to the fleet, so I’ll do something similar to this when that’s completed. This oddly go’s hand in hand with Tuesday’s post about creativity. Snap fit kits are a good place to start if you want to give model making a go, and make sure you have fun if you do, there is no right and wrong and don’t be afraid to be creative, none of the models featured are screen accurate and I have taken artistic licence with some of the colour schemes. I’ll end here for now. See you again on Tuesday.

Painting The Arcadia

The Hasagawa Arcadia box art.

So, we’ve made it to the third blog and are turning our attention to a bit of model making. Firstly I’m a bit late with this one. My plan was to have it up on Thursday, but this turned into a bigger, more involved piece than I thought it would.

Now, I don’t want this to become a series of tutorials, I love model making and like to share what I’ve learnt over the years. I’m not an expert builder, Youtube is full of really amazing builders whose expertise I would guide you to first. However, what I hope to do is show how fun it is to build and give confidence to those who don’t think they can or don’t feel they have the patience to make a model kit. What I’m about to share are simple techniques that I feel anyone can do. So lets take a look.

My current project is the version 2 of the Arcadia from Space Pirate Captain Harlock. It’s a 1:1500 scale kit by Hasagawa, it’s a really nice kit and the instructions are in full colour (well, the paint guide is) which is something I don’t think I’ve seen often outside of Bandai’s Gundam kits.

I won’t be looking at the build process at this stage as I still need to hone my nub and seam line removal skills. It’s all about practice and practice for me shall continue.

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The front section of the Arcadia and the paints used.

What I am going to look at is painting the front section of the ship which I’ll be doing in to sections. After it was built and the surface was prepared for painting, I used Humbrol’s 01 acrylic primer as a first primer coat, this was then followed by a couple of coats of Vallejo’s German Green Brown Surface Primer. Now, it’s worth pointing out that I’m a brush painter rather than an airbrusher, I really want to have a go and get my head round how to use them . Now Vallejo’s primers are great but for bigger projects like this they are probably not the best to use via brush, so I used the gray primer to give a bit more of a bite for the other primer and paint and so far it has worked well.

Once the primer dried it was time to lay the base coat on. for this I used ‘Medium Olive’ from Vallejo’s Model Colour range. this went on really nice, however, I over thinned the paint and had to use four coats to get the solid colour which isn’t a bad thing, but normally it would take at least two coats. To give a contrast I used a ratio of two parts ‘Olive Green’ (which is the next lighter colour up from the ‘Medium Olive’) and one part ‘Sun Yellow’ from Vallejo’s Game Colour range. The ‘Olive Green’ on its own wasn’t light enough to see a real difference against the base colour so the yellow helped to lighten it a bit more and gave the paint job a nice tint.

So how did I apply this? well, I drybrushed it on in a circular motion. I learnt this from a chap on Youtube called Foxx who has a channel called Model Making Guru, he called this a ‘reverse airbrush’. drybrushing it this way gives a nice finish and a similar look to airbrushing. I would say this though, that it is more time consuming doing it this way but the results are worth it.

When I was sure that all that had dried thoroughly, I moved onto the weathering. As you can see in the image above, I used masking tape along the panel lines and dry brushed black to create scorch marks. This was also done on the undercarriage of this fore section (not shown) to finish for now with this bit, I used ‘Dry Rust’ (From Vallejo’s Special Effects box set) to add to the dirt and grim. I reapplied the masking tape and using a stippling brush, applied the Dry Rust, wiping the excess of with kitchen paper. I also applied it randomly on the panels as well, just to dirty it up.

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The Skull and Crossbones and the paints used.

With the nose section put to one side, I turned my attention to the skull and crossbones that sits at the front of the kit. This was very simple to do. I applied the Humbrol Primer using two coats the I went ahead and put a base coat on of ‘Bonewhite’. Once dried, I applied the ‘Sepia’ from Vallejo’s Game Ink range. I’ve never used ink before and assumed that it would work like a wash. However, it didn’t. I thought I’d catastrophically got it wrong. before panic set in, I utilized kitchen paper in a last ditch effort to save it and happened across a happy accident. It looked really good, I just needed to dry brush on the Bonewhite to pic up the highlights and it looked good…until I decide to apply a varnish to it before it was ready. I had to start again. I tried to recreate it but could only get to how it appears in the above picture. Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy with it but wish I could have it as it was before.

We’re in the final stages now. and to finish up I attached the Skull and Crossbones to the front of the fore section with canopy glue. I used a couple of coats of Vallejo’s Polyurethane Gloss Varnish to help get colour in to the panel lines using Tamiya’s black panel line accent colour that was cleaned up using Humbrol’s Enamel Thinner and then a final couple of coats of Polyurethane Matt Varnish to finish.

Nearly at the end.

So this is where I am at the moment with the kit in the above picture. I’m nearly there. I do have something planed for all my completed kits in the coming weeks. I hope this has been informative. Model kits can be daunting with all the parts and the painting. but this is such a rewarding hobby and a lot of fun.

See you next time.