Tuesday, August 06, 2013

Skytrex piles

Pile of stuff 1

Painting complete, I'm quite pleased with these. The picture above shows the SMRA13 Piles of Crates & Oil Drums by Skytrex. It's a one-piece resin casting in 7mm scale.

Painting something like this can be a bit of a challenge. You've got to be careful when picking out the different items in the pile. This becomes a real problem when some dry-brushing is required such as the wicker basket. To be honest, you struggle to do much as the tendency is to colour surrounding objects.

The trick, as far as I can tell, it to give the whole thing a wash of dark colour once all the base colours are fully dry. This sits in the gaps between objects adding shadow and more importantly, hides little mistakes made when delineating one box from another.

Pile of stuff 2

Most of the rest of the pile is supplied as separate items. On the left is a smaller one piece resin stack but the rest are individual white metal goodies. I might point out that all this detail comes at a price - £15 for the stuff you see in this post. While I don't consider this expensive, it does mean I want all the items on display and not hidden away in a shed!

Those with more time than money could easily build all the items from plasticard with the exception of the oil drums wicker baskets. Without a lathe you'd struggle to do drums well so you are probably left buying them in. Wicker baskets - I've no idea where you'd start with those.

4 comments:

Paul B. said...

Peter Kazer made superb wicker baskets from wire and sewing cotton on his Southwold inspired 'Blythburgh' layout so it can be done.

Phil Parker said...

I can only aspire to being as good a modeller as Mr Kazer...

Next time I see him, I'll ask for more details. They are one of those things I'm not even sure where you would start with.

Iain Robinson said...

These look great, Phil, and well worth the money and time invested. A co-incidence...I was just reading the MRJ (206) with Peter's baskets in!

Phil Parker said...

They certainly were worth the money. Quite asside from looking good on the model (when they get there), I really enjoyed paiting them up. Good quality castings are like this - you get a lot of pleasure from them if you enjoy painting.