October 25, 2020
The Workbench week opened with me completing two of the Micro Art Studio’s Wolsung very nice and expensive box sets entitled the Fish Market. I’ve displayed one of the sets here on the square decks/docks that come with the Citadel Lake Town House. This week I plan on scratch building the actual decks/docks they will be sitting on using Evergreen Plastic. The figure is for scale… 28mm by Lead Adventure Miniatures.
I’m in the process of adding some larger docks/decks for my Citadel Lake Town house complex. The Citadel models include several docks/decks that are really walkways, and only one large square dock/deck and that supports the house. I need several dock areas that are the same size as the one that supports the house. Here are two of my scratch built square docks that I made using Evergreen plastic… these are both 4” x 4.” It’s really a very easy construction. To some of them I am adding some of the accent/detail pieces that come with the Citadel kits… this I hope will help unify the look between the Citadel decks and my scratch-built decks.
In this case I added one of the kit rails with a net. In the pictures, one supports a Wolsung fish market piece and the other a Kobblestone Miniatures’ treadmill crane. The figures are 28mm Artizan Design.
Continuing my work on my Gordon Institute Loch Ness project, I painted the Institute’s second submersible. This one is a one-man vessel that began its life as the Activision Skyland toy Reef Ripper. I got mine a couple years ago at the swap meet for $3.
Late in the week I completed my second Activision Skyland Reef Ripper. Like the first, I got this one at the swap meet for a couple dollars. I bought two because I want one of them, this one, to use when I do an underwater layout. The pole is made of an Evergreen plastic rod. The base is made of two large metal washers covered with Milliput. There are two seashells on the base that are actually plastic buttons.
I closed out the week making and painting four more docks… two 4” x 4” and two 2 ½” x 6” (these were made especially as docks for my two inboard motorboats.
October 18, 2020
As the week opened, I found a Hawthorne Village seated fisherman and decided to repaint him and put him on one of the Citadel Lake Town House docks. I also came upon three more Snapdragon pieces and painted them up as well. A week before, I decided I wanted another multi-pack of the Citadel Lake Town Houses and placed the order with Brookhurst Hobbies; they arrived in time for me to work on them this week. I wanted to use the Vallejo Model Color Yellow Green as the accent color on two of them and a light blue on the third. The yellow green was perfect, but I realized early on that the light blue or probably any blue was going to dominate the building, so I used it sparingly.
I did the Lake Town boats that came with the buildings, the sheds, and the square decks that the buildings sit on, but I’ve held off putting together the narrow docks for these last two buildings… not really sure why, but I am about to start scratch-building the wider docks so waiting on doing more small ones is probably not a bad idea.
October 11, 2020
This week I completed the last two of the nine Citadel Lake Town houses I began with. I fully admit that I have enjoyed working on them a great deal. They are great models, and I like them so much I ordered another multi-pack… hasn’t arrived yet. When I finished work on the nine, I moved on to painting more of the Snapdragon trees and fields/meadows. They are beautiful pieces. I did take a little break in my Snapdragon work to make some removable Milliput shrubs that I will use with my Citadel Lake houses so that those houses can be used in situations other than as part of a fishing village. I also realized that the outhouse that comes with the Lake Town house can also be configured as a shed that I could use as a removable attached structure that would serve the same purpose as my Milliput shrubs… I built and painted 9 of them. The week ended with all but a couple of the very small Snapdragon pieces completed and good progress made on the removable shrubs for my Lake Town houses. It was a very productive week
October 4, 2020
My time at the workbench this week was entirely focused on my Loch Ness project, but within that project I jumped around a bit. I began and ended the week by completing three more Citadel Lake Town houses. In between that work I made a decision to include a number of Snapdragon terrain pieces/trees, ponds and meadows as part of the Loch Ness collection. I have had these beautiful resin terrain pieces for more than 10 years. Unfortunately, Snapdragon is no longer in business, but luckily for me I was able to obtain a large number of them at Brookhurst Hobbies before they disappeared from the scene.
Each of the Citadel Lake Town houses comes with a very nice rowboat, and I have been painting them up as I paint the buildings and docks. This week I decided to do something a little different with one of them. I decided to make one up as a decaying beached version of the boat. I set it on a Milliput base with Milliput scored as shrubs encroaching on and into the boat. I gave the boat a Vallejo Flat Earth base coat and then dry brushed mixtures of tans and light grey to give it a decaying appearance. I also added a tarp in the bow of the boat made of facial tissue.
Several years ago, I was fortunate to find two very nice plastic classic inboard motorboats on the bargain table at Arnie’s Trains. They are perfect for 28mm and for the time period of my Loch Ness project. I sanded the bottom of each boat flat and set each of them in a base of Milliput to act as a water surround. Once the base was dry, I gave the boats new paint jobs. I think they will be great additions to the project.
