As mentioned in the Cloudbase post, the original plan with the Captain Scarlet builds was to do something with some Airfix Angel Interceptors I had in the stash. I'd picked up three from Pennine Models about a decade ago, and started building two of them. A third was unbuilt, and a quick look online showed that these out-of-production kits go for biiiig money nowadays.
I probably could have flogged this on instead of building it, but what the hell.
Painting was quite easy; primed, then sprayed in white, transfers fitted and some light detail painting.
I also gave them a bit of a weathering, using Citadel Miniature 'Nuln Oil' washes (something I use a lot of these days).
It was at this point I hit a problem. A major one. See, since I started building the kits, I'd had to pack them up and move them a few times, and somewhere along the way, I'd lost the canopies. No amount of searching of the loft turned up the ones for the missing two canopies.
No bother, I thought, I'd do some 'solid' canopies, using Blue Stuff and Green Stuff, making a blue mould of the existing canopy of that third kit.
Except I'm still a newb with this stuff, and my experiments failed quite spectacularly, and I was running out of time before we set off to Wales, so I packed all the bits to do when we got there.
The backup was another Angel kit, this time a somewhat lower-quality Imai kit from Japan, again sourced through eBay. Lower levels of detail, but easier to assemble. Definitely more toy-like, as I suppose was the Cloudbase model from the same manufacturer.
It was to a slightly smaller scale, but I thought it would work for forced perspective shots. The pic above shows the difference in weathering (all of the miniatures in the real Anderson productions were weathered to make them look more lifelike of course, I thought I'd try for the same effect).
And then two more problems hit.
First; I realised that, whilst I'd bought the casting materials with me, I'd left the damned canopy moulding for the Airfix Angel in the pocket of my work trousers (I'd intended to save time before the Easter Holidays by casting them during my lunch breaks at work). So I only in fact had the basic, smaller scale, toy-like Imai Angel.
Problem Two; Storm Kathleen, as mentioned in the Cloudbase post.
The plan to shoot the pics was to use a home-made rig to take pics with. This was something I'd tried maybe 15 years ago, and had a new go at making. Handheld camera mount, telescopic aerials for portable radios, and lots of duct-tape, the Technicians Friend.
The awful weather meant all I could really shoot were some test pics, but they showed what I could do when I got back to Yorkshire, where I'd still have a week before Anderson Day 2024
Getting home, another disaster reared its head. It turned out that I'd not just left the canopy for the Airfix Angel in the pockets of work trousers, in my haste to wash and prepare my uniform before I set off for Wales I'd inadvertently tumble-dried, and melted, the canopy for the Airfix Angel. "Argh" didn't quite cover my response when I found out. Nobody had copies or spares online, and I wasn't about to spend £60 on another kit, so it looked like, with a week to spare, I just had the one lower-quality Imai kit to play with.
£20 for another Imai kit however, of a larger scale and less toy-like appearance? More do-able. Ordered on the Monday morning, it said it would arrive on Weds. It would be cutting it tight, but should turn up in time to build, paint, and shoot with.
Of course it actually arrived on the Friday. Amused, I was not.
Another nice, simple kit to build. Parts were good, and free from flash.
What the hell... this is their take on the comely female sexy fighter pilots, apparently. Nightmare Fuel Incarnate.
A bit of a trim was required, to try and create a reflective visor.
For this model, with only a few hours to build, paint, and weather it, I was stuffed for paint, so had to prime it in black rather than grey.
A very quick paint (it was still tacky when I applied the transfers, which wasn't ideal). At least the kit had arrived sealed, so the transfers mostly went on okay; the other Imai kits were older, and the transfers all failed (as I'll explain in the next post, on the SPV kit). I only had one transfer, one of the roundels, fail with this, on the other side of the body.
The two Imai Angels on the shooting rig; after that original plan with the Airfix Angels, it was ironic I'd end up using two of the Imai kits for the final photoshoots...
No comments:
Post a Comment