Thursday, October 22, 2020

A Hi-Vis Makeover

Apologies for not posting recently. To be honest I've not had the time to do much physical modelling and so haven't had anything to post about. One thing I have done though is to sort out a driver figure for the 16mm Simplex model I've been slowly working on.

I'd decided to use Christopher Clueless from I P Engineering as he fits nicely in the cab, but after talking to Toby (who is quite adamant about what the model should look like for when he gets to drive it in the garden) we decided we wanted him to look a little more modern. Specifically Toby has a hi-vis jacket (a Christmas present a couple of years ago) which he wears to and from nursery over winter when it's dark and he thought the driver should wear one as well.

Fortunately the original casting has Christopher wearing a shirt and waistcoat and so it was reasonably easy to change the wasitcoat into a hi-vis jacket; griding off the pockets and adding some detailing for the silver sections. The main problem was figuring out the painting.

I've got into the habbit of painting figures starting from a black undercoat and then thin layers of paint which give a nice depth to the colours. Unfortunately this didn't work well with the yellow. The yellow is a nice fluroesent colour from Vallejo's Game Color range, but it wouldn't cover the black at all. After a couple of tests I settled on painting two layers of white over the black undercoat, and then a couple of layers of the yellow. This gave nice coverage while still giving a little of the depth.

Even though this is much bigger than the things I usually paint, the close up photo is still really quite cruel. In reality I think it looks quite good, and hidden a little inside the cab of a loco I think it will work quite well. If nothing else I'm unlikely to loose it in the garden!