Sunday, January 23, 2011

RtC [Road to Competition]: And So It Begins...

Once again, KublaCon is on my radar for the main painting competition to enter this year. This year I've decided to paint a War Hog for my entry so I figured I would chronicle the entire effort on this blog. Everything from initial planning through the final event. The series is going to span several months (since KublaCon is Memorial Day Weekend) so I'm going to tag these posts with the RoC label for easy reference.

Why did I choose the War Hog? It's certainly new and cool, but I chose it for other reasons than that. First of all, it has both "organic" and "machine" components to it which will challenge my abilities. This is also a good opportunity to display different techniques on the same model which can help win the judges' attention. Second, it's a good sort of model to draw attention to the PP line of models, which I enjoy trying to do. Third is that it's a larger model, and I wanted to focus on a larger model as my single entry rather than a smaller one. With my selection solidified, it's time to start the ball rolling. The next step is to go ahead and unbox the model and start looking over the parts.

Here are the various pieces for the War Hog, freshly unboxed. There are 14 total which could be a little intimidating. I went ahead and spent tonight prepping the pieces by trimming and washing them. I spent about 45 minutes on this step since making sure to catch as many ragged places to trim during this phase saves plenty of headache later. Since this is a serious competition piece, I decided to take the extra step of washing all the pieces with warm soapy water and scrubbing them with an old toothbrush. This helps get rid of any residue. Overall the pieces were in remarkably good condition and relatively little trimming was necessary. The biggest work was on the edges of the axe blades where a lot of filing was necessary.

My next step will be to begin assembly once all the pieces have dried. Here is pictured the assembly instructions from the back of the box. Due to the large number of pieces, I'll need to do it in sections so I'll need to spend a little time strategizing how I want to do that assembly. That's enough for tonight though, as I have other projects I want to get some work done on at the same time. For example I want to get Saeryn assembled so I can prime her tomorrow, and the Raptors are down to just final touch ups.

1 comment:

David said...

Good luck! For a competition piece I have to say that a careful job with cleaning and assembling is very important, and time spent at this stage is rarely wasted. There's nothing worse than thinking you did a good job prepping something, and then noticing a mold line you missed as soon as you do your first wash.

Anyways, I'll be following this series with interest.