Progress On The Land Raider

I have made some progress on the Land Raider since my last post on it.  Lots to cover.

And this is what it looks like before I even add the weapons.

First of all, this thing is cool as hell.  The photos aren't perfect- getting a camera stand, some decent lighting and whatnot is on my to do list- but even if it doesn't look bad ass in the pictures, it is when you look at it in person.  This thing just kind of grows in aspects and areas of coolness as it is assembled and painted the way a town in the old game SimCity does.  At first, its just look little piece of this, cool little part of that, then it gets bigger, and you're like, hey, I'm cooking now.  And then you do a little more, and its three times cooler than it was before.  And you do a bit more work, and suddenly, its twelve times cooler.  And before you know it, you've spent six hours on the thing and you have an airport and a sports stadium and no crime and 100% fire coverage and the best road and mass transit system going ever and you look down on your little creation and you think, damn... I made that!

Instead of a door, there is a space marine supply
cupboard in the door frame here.  Um... Why don't
they just keep all that stuff inside the Land Raider proper?

Right now, I'm nearly done with the color blocking of the outside. I used a thick brush to get the big sections of things with two layers of ultra marine blue, and need to go in with smaller brushes to get in the nooks and gaps.  I am going to do a separate entry on some stuff I picked up assembling the thing.  I learned a lot in the process, and I'll cover that later.  But for now, here is what I have.

I have the sides built, top on, treads added, and obviously, have the interior done. I built the model so that the doors open so you can see the details I painted in the interior.  I thought I would be half done when I was complete with the interior walls section of the model- everything else looked like it was just big, wide, flat surfaces that would easily be painted.  It was the details that were going to take all the time, and those were all on the inside, right?

Yeah no.

Port side door closed!

I really discounted how much work painting the treads would be.  I'm also not using an air brush to paint the outside, which would probably save me a ton of time.  In any case, I now consider myself about halfway done.  I will need to do detail work on the exterior as well as get the weapons assembled and painted... but we'll see.  I figure I'm probably on hour ten or eleven on this project.  Will I be done at hour twenty or twenty two?  We'll see.  And if so, how cool will it be at that point?

 So what do I have going on here?  Well, first, as I said, I have it set up so the doors open and close. You can build your Land Raider so that all the doors are glued shut, but I knew I was planning on painting the inside details when I started that project, and just had to hope the doors were cool.

Port side door open!  And you can see the computer station
inside the Land Raider itself!

The doors are very, very cool.  The port side doors slide back and forth.  There are blocks to keep them from sliding too far apart and blocks in the middle of their track, both on the top and bottom, that make the doors come together in the center.  It looks cool.  The *really* cool door though, is the main hatch up front.  Again, you can glue it together.  If you don't, there is a little turning lever assembly that connects to the posts that the the front doors are attached to.  The way the assembly works is that as one door is opened, the other door will open as well.  It is *really* cool.

I put some close combat knife bits on the rack inside the
forward hatch.

The Land Raider doors are too small for any space marines to actually stand inside of. You could slide them in horizontally.  And the cool thing about the Land Raider is that it actually looks like it is tall enough for some Space Marines models to fit inside of the thing. Some one who wanted to do a *really* awesome interior could get a few of them standing inside, receiving final orders and assembling their gear.  Or someone could put a little map table inside of a Land Raider, as the cable is completely empty.  It being empty does make it possible to see the details painted on the walls through the doors, however.

You can kind of see the engine wall in the back of the
Land Raider cabin in this shot- hard to get enough
light in there AND get the camera lens in the right place
but I think you get the idea. 

I still need to finish the following steps to complete this project:

1. Finish the exterior paint blocking.
2. Paint the door covers
3. Paint and assemble the weapons
1. forward chain gun
2. side guns (I'll be doing the hurricane bolters)- two sets of these. 
3. top mounted multi melta
4. Paint and assemble the other bits
1. portal covers
2. smoke can launchers
3. flood light
4. communications array
5. etc.
5. detailing the exterior
1. paint all the rivets 
2. clean up detailing
3. etc.

I am not planning on doing weathering right now.  I want to practice on another model first, and then apply it to this one.  I could do it right, but I don't want to risk screw this up.  So the weathering step is on the to do list.  Like getting better photo resources. 

And that is where I am right now.  I'll write again when there is news to post. 

Until next time,

David D.