My home office was out of commission today while the electric company replaced a transformer, so I did what anyone else would do in that situation and watched a Judith Light movie.* The review is already half-written but a slightly less successful endeavor was undertaken beforehand, one that taught me a valuable lesson: don’t paint in the dark when you can barely paint in the light.
A couple months ago I acquired one of these old kits; the plans in the box are dated 1987. It was partially constructed but unpainted and otherwise destined for the landfill. I thought something interesting could be made of it. After disassembling and priming it, I painted a piece or two of shrubbery to test some Vallejo colors. Then I set it aside and plotted the interior, which will be visible through a clear plastic facade.
Yesterday I spent more than a half-hour taping off the landscaping and anything else I didn’t want coated in Rust-Oleum; it should’ve taken 10 minutes at the most but my hands were obnoxiously uncooperative. It was windy on the patio so I fashioned a makeshift booth from a cardboard box and got to work.
Spraying scale models with a rattle can is a little old-fashioned, but I didn’t want to jump into airbrushing (or commit to its startup costs) without first familiarizing myself with other methods. Before bed last night I removed the tape, feeling a bit like Melvyn Douglas in A Woman’s Face or Antonio Banderas in The Skin I Live In. The unwinding of tape layers (or gauze, as in the movies) reminds me unfavorably of my own surgery days, when dressings were changed frequently — and painfully — for a couple weeks after each operation.
This morning I started on the details, brushing by hand in my darkened office. As the sky turned overcast it became even harder to make out the bricks and my work got sloppier than I realized. If it’s not obvious from the standard view, enlarging the photo will do the trick. Mostly I see the mistakes: things that need to be cleaned up, how to better tape (or not tape) next time, the lack of mortar. I’ve watched and read tutorials about using a white wash and wiping it off for mortar lines, but it must be done quickly and I’m at a disadvantage there.
One of the colors dried differently than I expected — I think it was DecoArt Americana’s ‘Georgia Clay’ — and looks too orange, but I’m on the fence about whether to correct it. My reference photos for this project were of the orange and red 7-Elevens of the 1970s and ’80s. Though I still have much to do, these two panels give you the general idea. The interior is incomplete: I’ve not yet found quarter-scale Slurpee machines, though they surely exist somewhere.
Here I’ll tease something else: concrete plans are coming together for the creation of my most ambitious dioramas. Yesterday I reached an agreement with a designer for four custom figures; a fifth was generic enough to purchase for $5 elsewhere. Last night I found a great 3D model of an early ’60s extended cab Dodge Power Wagon; next I’ll forward the files to a local guy to see what he’d charge for printing it.
Finally, I’m expecting a bubble mailer filled with miniature potatoes any day now. If the scale doesn’t look right, Crankenstein has gallantly offered to help me craft custom spuds using Sculpey polymer clay. Surely these details are enough for one of you lunatics to figure out what I’m making. The silliest part of the whole thing is that it’s basically a gift for Cranky readers, a way of saying “Thanks for sticking around. Here’s what I’ve been up to lately.” If I were to make one purely for my own enjoyment, it would feature a favorite sitcom.**
On a related note, this evening I was surprised to find 3D figures of several characters from one of Crankenstein’s most-beloved ’70s series: Emergency! Next I’ll have to look up whether anyone has created a Quincy, M.E. set. She’s never seen it but I loved watching reruns on A&E when my parents first got cable. Like Emergency!, it took an amusingly hard line against dope fiends and potheads, but Quincy’s sour disposition was more appealing than Kelly Brackett’s, even if it’s impossible to imagine Jack Klugman making it through an autopsy without getting cigar ashes all over the corpse.
* That’s why you should strive to keep your electronics charged. Just as you never know when you’ll need a full tank of gas, a situation that urgently calls for Judith Light could arise at any moment.
** It’s one of two dioramas I’ve planned based on that episode. For the second I’ll need to make several items myself. I’m haunted by a ridiculous vision of accidentally stabbing myself while trimming basswood and ending up at Urgent Care, where I must first explain to the triage desk, then the nurse, and then the doctor, how it happened. In an inpatient setting the explanation might earn you a psych evaluation: “Pt presents with slashed wrist and claims the injury was sustained while building a shower for Farrah Fawcett. Upon questioning, pt acknowledges that Fawcett died 15 years prior. Pt denies hx of hallucinations or substance use, states ‘If you were a 60-year-old gay guy, you’d understand.'”