Els

Hello all, I am going to build an Easter egg diorama. Since there are several different techniques involved with this, I decided to do a quick in-progress build. I will be using the Hasegawa P-51 and FW-190A egg plane kits: My idea is for a low level dogfight over some European hedgerows sometime in 1944. I know this isn’t realistic, but they are eggs so I can get away with it. For this I will have to mold/cast a part, build a base and display two aircraft in-flight. If anyone has any tips for a better/easier way of doing any of this than the way I am doing it, please let me know.

Thanks for your comments. Balls47 here is a post that had most of my egg planes. http://www.arcforums.com/forums/air/index....p;hl=collection Els

About a month ago the Hobbytown USA here in Melbourne Fl advertised that it was going to have a swap meet. I have been waiting for this in hopes getting a couple of good deals while people clear out their stashes. Well when I got to the swap meet, there were several tables/sellers but it was all radio control stuff. One guy had 4 kits but nothing I was interested in. I don't know if this shows the state of the hobby, or its just the majority of the customers at the Hobbytown are into RC (it was never promoted as a model swap meet, just a swap meet). So I decided to go inside and look arou

Hello all, Here is my latest egg plane. This is from the USAF Thunderbirds display team boxing. I am a huge fan of the Hasegawa egg planes but the decals in this kit sucked! They didn't fit very well, they ripped/cracked easily. I sealed the kit with a couple of coats of Future before decalling. I used Micro Set/Sol during decaling but after drying the decals kept flaking off. They only stayed on after I brush coated the kit with a couple of more heavy coates of Future. I ended up doing a lot of touch up's with paint and a brush. Even with the crappy decals, I am always happy to add

Have you ever converted a toy or something else to practice modelling skills? I found this cheap resin bust at a craft fair for $5.00 so I thought I would paint it up and see what it looked like. It is about 1:4 scale. I was pretty happy with the outcome. The next two items were toys that I found at a yardsale for $1.00 each. Neither of these items were in any kind of package and I have no idea what the first one is. I made up a quick base to pose it in flight (my attempt at a low level flight over tree's). All the underwing stuff is from my parts box(I know its not a realistic loadou

Thanks everybody, I appreciate the encouragment. Els

Thanks Els

I am calling this one Done! I changed the paint scheme a little but I think it is still in the spirit of the movie. I decided to add the logo to the back wall. The big brick area needed something to break it up. Thanks for looking and let me know what you think. Els

MarkW, Thanks for the compliment and the Gundam info. My LHS has a pretty big Gundam section so I may cruise over there this weekend and have a look at the 1:144 kits. Even though this is not a Gundam, it is what I will try to do (Its the second one down). http://www.worth1000.com/contests/10586/ar...cal-anomalies-8 Zoomer, Thanks for your input. I think you are right about the red border looking like graphitti. I have decided to overspray it with a darker red and have added some fungi tendrils spreading out. I liked the movie too. I just took it on its own and tried not to compare i

The logo has been chopped out of the floor. After that I filled the hole with some Bass wood and epoxied around the edges to seal the openings. Once that was dry I slathered on some Durhams putty to level it out. This is what it looks like now. I covered the area where the logo was with some more fine ballast and roots. Then painted it to look like the alien fungus. I cut out each individual letter from the logo and am thinking about adding them to the base in a haphazard fashion to resemble basement debree. The alien is down to 2 limbs again so I am holding him to give an id

MarkW thanks for your response. I like your idea of moving the rear end of the alien around. I will probably do that. I think that I am going to chop the logo out of the floor and center it a bit better. I really hate to do that though, filling it back in and making the revised logo look like it is part of the floor will suck. No guts no glory right... MarkW, I have a question that you might be able to help me out with. I checked out your website and you have some cool gundam kits. A few years ago I saw a picture of a Gundam partially frozen into an iceberg in the ocean and I have alwa

Thank you Holmes. I airbrushed some red on the Alien fungus or whatever it is. This is what the back of the base looks like. I need to darken up the wood on the outside a bit, it looks to clean. Here is the alien with some primer. Most of the areas that I changed look pretty good, just a little sanding to blend a couple of areas will be needed. I need to tweek the left arm/hand a bit to fit on the base better. Here is my dilema. I am not happy with the way the alien looks in the diorama. When viewing the diorama it is at a weird angle. The alien doesn't look very menacing eit

MarkW and Holmes Thanks for your comments. When I painted the bricks I used my airbrush and started with a light color and randomly sprayed a few bricks. Then I darkened the color and sprayed a few more bricks. I just kept on darkening and spraying random bricks until they were all painted. Then I put a few washes over it to tie it together. I chopped the alien apart and reshaped him to fit on my base. I will spray some primer tomorrow and see how much my sculpting sucked. I also did a little more work on the base. I glued some roots from the weed patch I call a yard and put dow

Thanks Steve. I made some progress on the base today. I chopped the plastic base that comes with the kit to size. I also built the back wall. I started by making a frame out of Balsa wood. I checked it with the alien to make sure the size was right. Then I started adding the slats and drywall from more balsa wood. They are a little out of scale but I didn't want to spend all day building this wall. And this is what it looks like. I will finish painting and adding washes later after I modify the alien. After I used the Durhams water putty to cover the Balsa foam I spread the

Thanks everybody. I really like egg planes, they are cheap, don't take up a lot of shelf space and are great stress relief builds. I have probably built at least 20 of them and I am glad that Two Bobs released some decals so that I can continue building them in different schemes. For the bases I was trying to go for the mix of a squadron coin and an old used poker chip. Els

While I build a lot of aircraft kits, my favorite builds are figure kits. Recently Pegasus Hobbies released a 1:8 scale alien from the remake of War of the Worlds. I bought it the other day and since I haven't worked on a figure for a while I couldn't wait to get started. The instructions say that the kit is made out of Vinyl and plastic. I am not sure what type of Vinyl that they used but I am not really digging it. The arms/legs feel like hard plastic but the body and head feel like the material that the 1:72 wargame figures are made out of. At first I super glued the three main arms

Lukas, You're welcome. I also have the Black Tiger kit and it is roughly the same size, they are very close to 1:72, maybe you are right with the 1:77. Hopefully if you build them you will post some pictures here. I rarely see any Star Blazers stuff. Els

172 Flogger, This is one of the old Bandai Cosmo Tiger II kits next to a Hobby Boss 1:72 F-16. I Hope that this is one of the kits that you are talking about and it gives you an idea of the size. Els

Hello all, Since I picked up the two new Egg plane sheets from Two Bobs, the eggs have moved to the top of my to do pile. First there is the Marine F-16N. I changed up the colors a little bit by replacing the gray color with tan (Hey, its my egg and I can cook it the way I want). I didn't think about the Marine decals being two different colors when I masked the kit so they are a little off. I was to lazy to remask and spray though. Next is the F-16 from the 414th Combat Training Squadron. And last there is the Tiger Meet F-16 from the 79th Fighter Sqn. I added some external fuel t

Your OV-19 turned out really nice. I built this kit OOB before and it wasn't easy. With all the extra's that you put into your kit, I would say that this is probably a huge understatement. Els

I am still plugging away at this. After looking over my progess it wasn't looking caricaturish enough so I bulked out the top and bottom more and moved the top gun back a little. Having used so many different types of putty I could not really tell how well I was doing. After some grey paint I can see that I still need a lot more puttying and sanding. It is getting there though. Symmetry is a Bit^%. If there would have been any planning what so ever I would have made some plasticard ribs and used them as a guide to make everything even. Here is the creature from the War of the Worl

Pminer, I didn't change the angle of the wings. I glued it the way AMT made it, but I am not sure how accurate the kits dihedral is. I may look at that when (if) I build another one. The angle that I took the picture at makes it seem more steep than it really is. If you want I can take a picture from the front. Els

After numerous rounds of putting and sanding I have roughly sculpted in the eyes with Aves. I have also been shaping the engines. Trying to get the engines the same on both sides is driving me crazy. I have a lot of respect for people that build accurate aircraft kits from scratch. Even though this is just a caricature and doesn't have to be very accurate, I still want it to be close. I am counting on the black paint to hide some of my shoddy workmanship. I decided I wanted to enlarge the area around the belly guns so I built the area up with Aves. I have also attached the tail wit

All, thanks for all the input. Robert Your fix for the ribbing sounds like a lot of work but I think it also sounds like the best idea I have heard for dealing with this area. I will definitely be trying this on the next 135 I build. I tried to use stretched sprue to replace the sanded away ribbing but I could not maintain any consistancy. Sometimes crappy pictures make a finished kit look worse but in this case the crappy pictures helped my kit out. Pminer To hopefully cure the wing droop I went to the local hardware store and bought a couple pieces of metal rod. I cut some grooves in

Thanks everybody. If any of you have built one of these, how did you deal with the bands around the back of the body after sanding the seam line? Now, if I could only find a place to put this thing. Els