Jon Zucchi's Hobby Blog: May 2015

Basecoat

Highlighting with screaming skull in a combination of highlighting and drybrushing. The highlighting wasn't that bad actually as you might think it would be. I had the good painting energy that day and the whole job took me a few hours. They are just straight lines after all.

Painted engines, cockpit windows and aquila plus a few other detail in spots. I was kind of shocked at how little detail I felt needed to be picked out in another color. I added black and brown washes to the engines and a brown wash to the eagle. I also added a black wash to the windows but I'll probably give the windows another coat or two of light gray.

Now I'm waiting for my Forge World Vendetta conversion kit to arrive. Then after that, depending on how my summer goes, I may add the decals. Looking at the pictures now, there are a few detail areas I want to make silver and there are a few highlight lines I'd like to clean up. Damn, those engines look nice though. Maybe I will highlight them a little bit and also maybe create a burn trail along the back half of the aircraft.

The Forge World Vendetta conversion kit came very quickly. Here it is out of the box.

Here it is clipped and dry fitted together. The lascannons fit together very well but there is always the obligatory spare resin removal that has to happen.

I'm going to magnetize all of the weapons so I can field it both as a vendetta and a valkyrie if I need to. The first thing I need to do is trim off the top joint of the lascannons as you see below.

After it's trimmed it will look like this. In fact, if you wanted to you could go ahead and flatten out the entire top surface for an extra smooth and flat area to embed your magnets in.

You also have to cut off one of the joints on the missile pods like I did below. A nice flat surface to drill magnet holes into.

And you must cut off one of the four body fins on the missile, again, for a flat surface.

Here is the body joint that will house the magnets that are attached to the body unders the wing. I filled it will green stuff putty, trimmed and sanded it so it was flat.

Here is a picture of all of the weapon options for the valkyrie and the vendetta. There are quite a lot of bits to magnetize. I hope I will have enough magnets! There are the twin-linked lascannons of the vendetta as well as missile pods, hellstrike missiles and a nose lascannon and multi-laser for the valkyrie. Also, there is the nose sensor bit that goes on the bottom front of the cockpit.

So, unfortunately, the magnets have not arrived in the mail yet. I was hoping they'd get here so I could finish magnetizing and prime/re-prime the weapons. They'll be here in a few days. I've already started marking the places on each weapon where I'm going to drill the magnet holes. I'll take a picture of that next and post it soon. I need to make sure I get the magnet polarity right. I'm a little nervous about that. I just need to be careful what polarity I have before I jam any magnets in their holes. I did have some time to paint a few extra highlight lines and some other detail on the body today (because I didn't have the magnets). I will post that picture up to on my next update.

In this picture below, you can see the black dots that will be the drill points for the magnet holes. The magnets are 2mm x 1mm. It will take very little drilling, just enough of a hole to be flush with the outside surface of the weapon.

Ok, I've got my bag of weapon options.

I've got my selection of modelling drill bits.

And I've got my magnets, which took forever to arrive. The first shipment got lost in the mail so the seller had to re-send the item after about 15 days (but he sent extra magnets to satisfy this buyer!). The magnets that I used for this are 2mm x 1mm. The larger magnets (2mm x 2mm) the seller sent me for the item being late I'm going to keep in my bits box. I'm sure I'll be able to find a use for them in time and so I won't be using them for this.