60 - TOEMP Challenge #3 Update

Unfortunately, real life over the past couple of days interfered with my painting schedule. I had originally intended to finish the Sentinel a day or two ago, but it's taken me until today to finally get it done. It's still not 100% complete though. I still need to thoroughly highlight it and get more coverage on the Hunter-Killer Missile before I'd officially call it done.

Overall, though, I like it. It was much harder to paint than I expected, but I think I slowed myself down by making some first-time mistakes that I hopefully will not duplicate. Some things I learned:

1) Prime a vehicle in the predominant color of the basecoat. In this instance, I should've primed the sentinel in Hunter Green instead of Black. I could've then gone over the parts I planned on painting in another color in Black, if I wished. Priming it in Black, on the other hand, forced me to spend way too much time applying the Hunter Green basecoat.

2) Don't bother painting the interior of a vehicle that will not ever see the light of day. With this Sentinel, since I glued the top of the cabin down, the few hours I spent painting the interior and the pilot kind of went to waste. I mean, yes, you can sort of see the pilot through the viewing hatches in front, but the rest of the interior of the cabin is basically invisible. At most, I'd paint the pilot and leave it at that. However, for vehicles where the interior can be seen by opening a hatch or a door, then I'll still go ahead and paint it up.

3) Make sure to use the right pieces when putting the vehicle together! This was just me being distracted and unobservant. For the cabin of the Sentinel, before I knew it, I had glued the open-topped side panels onto the cabin frame instead of the armored side panels. As a result, the top hatch wouldn't fit neatly onto the cabin. I had to resort to doing some cutting with my hobby knife and then filling in the gaps along the sides with greenstuff. I'm actually pretty happy with the greenstuffing (on top of this being my first attempt at putting together a vehicle, it was also my first attempt at using greenstuff to fill gaps and make corrections). Up close, it looks obvious I greenstuffed, but from a reasonable distance, the greenstuff appears pretty seamless.

All of these 3 mistakes cost me a lot of time and motivation. While I enjoyed working around these issues, they also tested my patience with the model, and that's not a good way to maintain interest in something.

Well, I've got roughly 2 more days to finish the rest of the base (the Khorne Bezerker and some sort of barrier to simulate a defensive position) if I want to complete this challenge 24 hours before the Sunday deadline. It's Labor Day weekend in America, and my wife and I don't have anything planned (except possibly watching "Inglourious Basterds" on Saturday or Sunday), so I should have plenty of time.