Semovente

2012 may not be over but my latest project, the 1/35 Hard Graph Semovente tank from Gundam’s Universal Century’s, has been wrapped up.

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As usual, my blabbering about the project first and the rest of the pictures are down below.

Overall she was fairly quick build, the first coat of paint went on Nov 30th/Dec 1st sometime. The tank is a huge beauty featuring sturdy construction and a ton of detail. There’s so much detail on this that it puts a lot of normal gunpla kits to shame. Welds, stippled areas, and hatch hinges and clasps galore. I understand why folks love to build model tanks. For me, however, it was bit detour from what I generally do. At first it was odd working with such large and small pieces but it’s easy to get a hand of. Unfortunately it’s a lot easier to apply too thick a coat at a one time so I had some bleeding around parts of my camo masking. I didn’t want to do anything too traditional whether it be the desert tans colour is designed in or forest greens. At first I thought of doing a dark grey theme styled after some German WWII tanks but instead went with a custom blue grey colour, imagining a tank sneaking around in a foggy British winter. I left a bunch of tools off the kit, along with the scale figures. Maybe one day I’ll have the room to build a diorama so they’ll be stashed away until then. read more

After about 20 days of work my Semovente is ready for weathering. For the most part things went well. The colour scheme looks okay and aside from a few areas where my paint coats were too thick the digital camo looks pretty good. Paint went well on everything else. I did lose a few pieces somehow, including a bit of handle bar that goes on the rear of the kit. I may try to recreate it if I can find some piping thin enough but I’ll likely just pretend it never existed in the first place 😉 read more

Wooh, how about some WIP shots of my Semovente MBT? (How do you pronounce Semovente anyway?) But first, commentary!

Thus far things have been moving pretty quickly. Aside from a couple of days when I lost an integral part of my airbrush that is. As you can see I’m moving forward with my grey and grey-blue gray colour scheme. It’s certainly different which is think is great. Lots of little detail parts need to be done here and there. At some point I’m going to start weathering as well. There’s a possibility I’m going to overdo it so appreciate these clean shots while they last. Also, you may notice that I’m doing digital camo again. This time only two colours under the main colour and at an angle. I hope it comes out okay, placement of the first layer went well but I wasn’t fond of how the second went on. The first coat of the top colour is currently drying. read more

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Inspired by some great looking projects out there (such as Khai62‘s) I decided to dust off my kit and snap fit the parts. My first impression is that the kit was huge! Before opening the box (which I’ve had since Decmeber 2011 – I likely opened it up once back then said "woah it’s huge" only to forget until now) I expected it to be about the size of my 1/144 Hildolfr. Guess I missed the part about this kit being 1/35 scale. read more