It’s been a long time since my last post and in the meantime 2011 has come to an end. I have quite a bit of Ma.k to catch up to and my first post for the year is about the Rappoon I’ve been working on for a few months and that is finally completed! Here is a short diary of this build.
After the construction which involved the bashing of the Raptor from Modelkasten and the Nitto Raccoon, I ended up having to chose a pose for the suit. Given that it is a reconnaissance unit I decided for posing the Rapoon as if it was pointing its finger indicating an enemy target. After the pose was more or less decided, I built the joints. I used Apoxie Sculpt for the purpose and as usual for me, they turned out a bit to oversized for the scale.
The suit was then sprayed with a dark brown basecoat from a rattle can and then the first colour (the light green) was applied with a brush. Painting of the light green was done in thin, successive layers and to give a bit more interest to an already complicate looking suit, in a way to let the basecoat be somewhat still visible. The second colour in this camo scheme is the RLM-75 Grey and again this was applied in thin layers. The id markings are in sky blue. All the paints were either glossy or semi glossy which allowed for direct application of the decals. Now, talking about decals, one mistake I made was to use the old Modelkasten ones that came with the Raptor Kit. Unfortunately old decals tend to turn quite yellow and appear to be much thicker than new ones so the results on the model were not particularly exciting.
Once the decals had dried overnight, I moved on to wearing out the paint by means of a 3M superfine abrasive sponge. The sponge seems to work better than abrasive paper for this purpose. It follows the shape of the suit in a much gentler way than the paper and the scratches are not too deep.
Next, I went about doing pinwashes all around the suit using oil paints (mostly Burnt Umber) and when these were dry, I sprayed the suit with a coat of flat paint.
The final weathering included some yellow and ochre oil paint filters on the grey areas and pigments from the Tamyia Weathering sets.
Some more images of the finished Rappoon
