Drawings by Khor Seow Hooi

Saw this book on sale at Books Kinokuniya. Drawings by Khor Seow Hooi
There are some really nice watercolour renderings of rustic scenes (the cover is indicative of what to expect inside) from malaysia, singapore and china.

Trex Mech gear

Here's a quick peek at the latest progress for the Trex Mech project. I've attached the 2 bedrolls I created in a previous post. You can see the resin cast belt buckles and the nicely painted straps. I used Leukoplast elastic adhesive tape which is a rubberised fabric tape meant for first aid purposes. The fabric pattern is an excellent representation of webbing material in 1/6 scale. Of course I had to paint and weather it first.
You can see that I've also added some extra gear around the bedrolls. These are loose WW2 German 1/6 scale accessories - a gasmask canister, bread bag and mess tin. I've attached them temporarily to see how it would look, I still have to paint these guys.

alien is a tiger?

Part 3 of my alien bust Gha Nachkt. This time I've brush painted in the details using vallejo model color acrylic vinylic paints for the head and Tamiya acrylics for the shirt. It seems I've failed to replicate my reference image from the previous post. Instead, I've ended up with something that looks like a tiger!? well, hopefully the subsequent shading and highliting will fix this, fingers crossed. As for the shirt, I've rough semi dry-brushed on blue and field blue to get a brush painted texture look that is the signature of the Clone Wars TV series. The shirt also still needs shading and highliting, but glossiness aside, I do feel the shirt is coming along better than the head.

Diecast Totoro Bus

I got a wonderful treat from a friend of mine last week. He gave me a miniature diecast replica of the commuter bus from the Miyazaki animated movie Totoro purchased from the Ghibli museum. Awesome! Click on the highlited words to find out more about this movie. Meanwhile, the miniature bus comes with a bus stop sign and 2 ultra mini totoros.The bus itself features a simple interior (no passengers or driver), rubber tires and clear plastic windows. The box also comes with a small picture (printed on cardboard) of the scene from the movie where the girls are waiting for their father to come home on the bus at night just after the rain.
Now the gears in my mind started a churning - a potential project! How about nice little shadow box diorama of the scene complete with driver and passengers, lit lamp post, rain effect and of course scratchbuilt figs of the girls, totoro and the umbrella? Would be nice, but I guess this will be anothe one of those ideas filed away in the back of the long list of projects. We'll see, we'll see.

Merry Christmas!

Ooh, a Merry Christmas to one and all!

Bedrolls for Trex Mech

One of the first things I have ever learned to do in terms modelling my own accessories is how to make my own bedrolls from scratch. I learned this from the book "How to Build Dioramas"by Sheperd Paine. If you are ever going to buy only 1 book on modeling in your lifetime then this is the book I would recommend bar none!

So for my Trex Mech project, I wanted to load it up with a bunch of accessories to give it a lived in look. And bedrolls is our first stop. It's a very simple thing really. I take a piece of wet towel, the kind you get from restaurants, and cut this to twice the width of my bedrolls and long enough to give it some bulk when rolled up. I fold in the sides to make it look thicker and then roll it up. I use a bit of white glue at the end. I then tied it up with some thick dental floss cause I couldnt find any string at home. The larger of the 2 bedrolls had some synthetic foam filler rolled inside to bulk it up.
When the dry, they were painted with acrylic paints. In hind site, I could have sealed it with some white glue or primer before painting to get a smoother paint surface. In the picture you can see some resin buckles I've cast for the straps that will secure the bedrolls to the mech. I really like how they turned out and will one more bigger and longer tarp to hang onto the side of the mech.

dolls for dudes

Another one of my virtual hangouts added to the links section, this time its a forum site dedicated to 1/6 scale action figures: www.onesixthwarriors.com
It's a good source for up to date news about the world of 12 inch dolls and occasionally you'll come across some awesome custom builds.