7. Creature Comforts

 The best laid plans of mice and men, yeah the trouble with plans is that they have a bad habit of changing, they morph into...better plans, worse plans, crazy silly nonsense plans, the plan for this has changed so much that I cant even remember what I was doing, let alone what the plan was, I think the original plan for this was to construct the whole model, and then spray it all black (pre shade) with an airbrush, and work from there, with brown and orange shades, which is a fairly sensible plan it has to be said, but I threw that plan out the window, because It's far too...sensible, I wanted to experiment with chaos texture and colour, but all at the same time, plus make life hard for myself, which I tend to do a lot if I'm being honest, mainly because I'm bored stupid with model making these days.

 Picture above left, the large lump of plastic with the two sink marks was removed because it's probably wrong, and with regards to construction, if it looks wrong, then it probably is wrong, there was probably something there that looked vaguely like that once upon a time, but not anymore on this rusty abandoned wreck, so it got removed with a large rotary bur, and the top arrow is pointing at some mildly warped hull sides, which is the result of using poly cement to laminate plastic card onto the inside of the hull, which you should never do as it will always result in some form of warping or crazy bowing in the plastic over time, because poly cement is very aggressive stuff, It's much better to use ca or maybe epoxy, It might not happen straight away, but you just give it a few bloody years.

 But anyway, I had to put some bench bracers in to straighten it all out and get the hull sides vaguely square again, and then make those benches look vaguely like the rusty rotted out remains of a fighting compartment interior, which was not all that successful it has to be said, to me they look like little rusty benches that you could have a sit on, if the mood took you, and talking of moods, the picture on the right is what a hull looks like after you cover it with burnt umber acrylic mixed with rusty pastel shades, very moody and not very nice, but it's a good starting point.

 Picture above, at this point I thought it might be a good idea to scratch some rotted out sponsons from very thin plastic card, It would of been an even better idea had I thought about doing it before I painted the lower hull, but let's not dwell too much on that, I cut them from card, glued them on, and blended them in, and there's not much left of the sponsons to be honest, which is a good thing, as it makes upper hull fitting much easier, and I've used artistic license on these (the horror) In fact I've been using artistic license from the start, but let's not dwell on that either, It doesn't matter, It's all just rusty rotted nonsense.

 Picture above, and talking of rusty and rotted, this is where I've ended up so far with the lower hull, all the suspension units apart from two got cut off again with a rotary bur, It's kind of shocking how good a cut you can get with a rotary bur, It's a lot easier and faster than using some form of fine modelling saw that's for sure, but anyway, the wheels and suspension are all still work in progress, I tend to consider all of this as a starting point to add further effects to later.

 Picture above, this simply shows the new transmission in the front of the hull and the new shape of the back of the hull, which I like much better now, plus absolute chaos in terms of texture, maybe a little over the top, but It doesn't really matter because it's just the lower hull, with the upper hull and turret I might need to be a bit more careful, I can't afford to trash the Dragon turret anyway that's for sure, as there's zero chance of getting another one of those, the rest of it is all expendable and good for experimentation with rusty chaotic texture.

 To be honest I'm still 50/50 on whether I actually like this result on the lower hull, sometimes I like it, and sometimes I don't, It's best to just regard it as a starting point for adding further weathering effects to in the future I think, all the suspension and wheels need to go back on soon, they were all cut off because I changed my mind with regards to painting, I swapped from airbrush to a stipple painting method which meant the wheels and most of the suspension had to come off again.

 Matt