Little Tanks & Tiny People

Time for another car, only it’s a little bit different than the Gaslands vehicles from my last post. Back in 2000 or 2001, I bought a Tamiya RC kit for the 1999 World Rally Championship season Ford Focus. I had a lot of fun building and upgrading it with better electronics and faster motor. And of course driving it. Over the years, though, the polycarbonate body shell has received quite a few bumps, cuts and scratches. A little while back I decided to buy a new shell for my RC car. I could not find an original Tamiya shell, but Hpi racing makes a very good aftermarket shell with sticker sheet for the 1999 WRC. There are many little differences between the Tamiya and Hpi shells, but the overall appearance is very nice. And most importantly, it fits perfectly on the Tamiya chassis. It does not come with side mirrors, though, so I simply transferred those over from my original Tamiya shell.  Somewhat confusingly, an RC car shell is transparent and you paint the inside rather than t...

This guitar is the definition of the expressions ‘all’s well that ends well‘ and ‘third time's a charm’. It took three attempts over a period of a year and a half to get this result, but I am really happy with how she turned out.  For the paint scheme I was inspired by the grey-green camouflage used by the Koninklijke Luchtmacht throughout most of the Cold War, which was basically a direct lift from the livery of the RAF. For the final version I used the following enamel spray cans:   MoTip Olive Green Matte RAL 6014 MoTip Basalt Grey Matte RAL 7012 Dupli Aerosol-Art Clear Lacquer Matte I started my first attempt over the Christmas break of 2021. I removed the neck, but kept the pickups, bridge, etc. in place because I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to resolder the electronics properly. So, I carefully masked everything off, gave it a sand and got to painting. After a couple of weeks everything was done. I had ordered some decals from Redbubble and had given th...

I thought I’d do something a little different for my first post of 2023. I picked up this Batman figure second hand about 15 years ago. Back then he wore an all black suit with the Tim Burton yellow logo and a yellow utility belt.   I had repainted him years ago, but never really liked the result, so over the Christmas break I had another crack at it. I sculpted a new bat logo out of Miliput, filled in some of the joints, and repainted Batsy in a cel-shaded style somewhat similar to Mike Mignola’s artwork. I did this by illuminating the figure from the top left and then tracing the shadows. I tried to paint him so that the effect works from all angles, but I think it’s most effective from the front and left. The colour palette is very limited: Vallejo Medium Sea Grey 70.870 and Black 70.950 for the suit, Flat Earth 70.983 and Charred Brown 72.045 for the utility belt and Basic Skin Tone 70.815 for the skin. By the way, it may not come across in the pictures, but at 30 cm Batsy ...

Back in May, I saw Topgun: Maverick in the cinema and it got me really inspired to make something aviation-related. Rather than building a model kit, I figured it would be fun to scratch build something. After a bit of thinking I decided that that something had to be an ejection seat. I particularly liked the look of the Aces II seat, which is used in many aircraft including the F-15 Eagle, F-16 Viper, F-22 Raptor and A-10 Warthog. I found some really nice technical drawings of the Aces II seat online, which came in very handy for getting the basic shape and placement of the detailing right. T his is by no means a perfect recreation of the schematics, though. I was more concerned with getting the overall ‘feel’ right. I also didn’t build the seat to any particular scale. Instead, I scaled the image so that the side view was exactly the height of a sheet of A4. In other words, this thing was going to be pretty bloody massive!   The basic structure was made out of polystyrene she...

Over the last two years since I got back into the hobby I’ve painted several hundred minis and have slowly but steadily improved my painting skills. I thought it would be fun to test my painting skills by doing something I’ve never done before, painting a 1/10th scale bust. For my first attempt I didn’t feel like purchasing a pricy high end bust, because I wasn’t quite sure whether my painting chops would be up to the challenge. I did a bit of looking around online and found a decent looking second-hand bust made of cast alabaster (ground up stone mixed with a resin). The bust is a copy of the famous Diana/Artemis of Versaille, a Roman marble statue that is thought to be a copy of a Greek original in bronze that is now lost. Analysis of paint residues on classical statues has shown that these originally were not the white colour they are today, but were often painted in very bright (and garish) colours. It therefore seemed fitting for my first bust to be a copy of a classical statue....

The name of the blog may be Little Tanks & Tiny People, but this is an absolute beast! It’s a 1:16 scale replica of the iconic Tiger tank or, to give it its full title, the Panzerkampfwagen VI Ausführung E Tiger I. And it is a massive 53 cm long. The kit is made by Hobby Boss and it is basically an RC tank kit with the RC components removed. The number of parts is therefore fairly small, but there is still plenty of detail for painting.   I did a couple of conversions on this tank. The Hobby Boss kit comes with two metal combs. It is suggested that if you want a Zimmerit coat on your Tiger, you apply putty to the surfaces and then use the combs to texture it. After some experimentation I quickly learned that this was a sure way to ruin a perfectly nice model. I therefore splurged out on the Atak Zimmerit ZM-1603 kit, which isn't cheap but is of very high quality and definitely worth the price. The ZM-1603 kit is advertised to fit Tamiya models, but it also fits the Hobby Bo...