In Progress: Apothecary

I've actually been making some progress on models during the last week-plus, but have been quiet about it. It was a busy weekend that trailed into a busy early part of this week, but I found time last night to pull some images off my camera and clean them up.

Here's is where my Apothecary stands right now:

Obviously, all that is done is the white. I have a couple cleanup spots left here and there, but for the most part the white is finished. I painted this in the hardest possible way. I primed black, then painted all the armor grey. I then started layering white, backfilled any sloppy areas with grey again, and then cleaned up the spots again.

That was dumb. I should have just primed white, washed the seams grey, and then cleaned up. I was concerned about the effect white primer would have on my reds and blues, when I should have just painted black under those areas if I was worried about it. Lesson learned.

I also started picking away at the Vindicator, starting with the dozer blade.

That's my sloppy midtone coat. Once I've got the final color on there, I have to go back and clean up the seams and borders with the shade color. Eventually, I'll be adding an off-centered white or yellow stripe to the dozer to break up the monotony of the blue. I'll likely tape the area off and use my airbrush for that.

This is the old Forgeworld Vindicator kit, and I've encountered a couple problems with it. You can't see the back of the dozer in the pic, but the area behind the vision port is odd. Instead of being framed in riveted steel like the front, it's just a blank surface, but not flat. There's this weird, sunken border there that looks like a miscast, but isn't. I've seen it on other pictures of the model on other blogs. In hindsight, I wish I'd taken the time to add a strip of plasticard around the back of the port to make it look better.

I also had some areas where my hour of scrubbing wasn't able to remove all the mold release. They were small areas, so I didn't want to strip the model down and try again. Instead, I steadily added pure black paint back over the spots til it was covered. Very frustrating to have one half-millimeter spot on top, or some seam at the dozer attachment point that wouldn't hold primer. Here's hoping the mold release has finally washed away and the patches hold when painted and sealed.

It's been tough getting the time or energy to paint this week. I've been busy canning strawberry jam all week, plus hockey, keeping the garden, and the oppressive heat. In an effort to keep our electrcicty bill manageable, I've been closing the doors to rooms we aren't in, which includes the room I paint in. So, when I do have time to plop down and throw some paint around, it's 87 degrees in that room. I end up sitting on the couch in front of the air conditioner instead.

Hopefully this weekend cools down some, so I can move on to the rest of the Apothecary, as well as start cleaning and assembling the Standard Bearer.