KENNY X HAS A TANK

[speedgraflex]

Base maneuvers. I would have the local lumberyard cut some “shop cutting panels” to your specifications. Two pieces.



I like Peddinghaus. What happened? Did these fail in some way?

[KennyX]

That’s exactly what I need, Bruce!! Yessireee!! And thank you.

As to the decals, Nosir, no big fail per-se, and they held up great during cutting. But the film seems thick to me and that has me a little worried. My only real complaint was the crosses. The white bars around the cross weren’t consistent. Some sides were thick and others were thin, like they were misprinted or printed out of register or something.

[KennyX]

And in the spirit of giving credit where credit is due, I’m impressed! I thought for sure this decal would shred when I was cutting it to fit perfectly on that “demarcation” from the worn paint, butnitndidnt! That was awesome!

[Stikpusher]

Nice!

[KennyX]

After a rinse to remove any residue from the Micro Sol, it’s time for a clear coat to seal the decals. Did that, and now on to the rest of it!



Currently listening to:

[KennyX]

Nice!

Thanks chief! That was an afterthought Indra I wanted to run with! What better way to make a decal look painted on than to slash the decal so that doesn’t show up on an undercoat! We can do that! Take off a layer of paint and only have the decal showing on the top layer, why not!?

[KSaarni]

That will look great on your shelf ! I am amazed also how quickly you made this, something you cannot tell by studying the work ! Based on what I see, this is a build that would take months....

- Kari

[KennyX]

Kari,

It’s a funny thing. I guess at this stage in the game, “going slow” meant that I didn’t paint it all in one go. Instead, I broke it down into the feet, legs, midsection and the top. But yeah. That still went quickly. Almost ridiculously quickly.

Here’s what happened.

From the time I was a kid, whether I was drawing or painting or sculpting, I always had the ability to fixate on projects that I really, really liked. The flip side of that is, I could never really get into projects that I thought were boring... I remember the Art teacher I had all four years of High school. Mrs. Sue Lewis. One of the only teachers I ever had whom I remember fondly. Anyway, Mrs. Lewis was maby just a bit over-indulgent with me She’d be speaking at the beginning of class, going over what we’d be doing that day, and she’d always follow the lesson plan up with “And Kenny, you just go ahead and feel free to do whatever you’d like, today.” And I always did. And always enjoyed myself. I’d pick a subject or an idea that I could really get into, and a medium, and I was off to the races. And in every case, if the project enthralled me, it would very quickly take on a life of its own and, well, “just happen” as quickly or as slowly as “it wanted”. And by and large, I didn’t really have a semblance of a say in it.

So with this project here. From that first conversation I had with Bruce where the idea happened, Is think about it every day. And sometimes at night, if I was having a bad spell of insomnia, I’d think about it. I’d talk myself through how Inwanted to do the paint, how I wanted to mix the colors, and so forth. In a sense, I’d already painted this thing a hundred times in my mind before I sat down to paint it. Heh, it’s part of the reason I haven’t finished my Panzer. The Panzer was a “hey try this and see if you like it” thing, and I built everything except for getting the wheels and tracks on there, painted it, broke out the oils on it for the first time, found that I enjoyed working with them, and then BOOM!- a voice in my head said “Good. Now that you know you can do it, it’s time to pull the trigger on the Afrika Korps AT-ST.”

And I got after it. And true to form, it took on a life of its own.

Only this time I did have a semblance of control over the process. I broke the painting and subsequent chipping down into sections. And I’m glad for that. Because printing this thing was a challenge. The operating idea was “Paint it well but make it look like a hastily-applied field job” and that isn’t easy. But it worked. And I think because I was thinking about it so much and going over it and over it in my head so much, and was so fixated on it, I was able to still execute it relatively quickly and exactly as per my wishes, even with breaking it down into sections.

But yeah, that’s my process in a nutshell, with these things.

[Stikpusher]

It’s refreshing to read that somebody else also is awakened at night obsessing over a project. Breaking it down, trouble shooting, problem solving, planning the next phases...

[KennyX]

My wife -God bless her- was shocked when I told her how all-consuming it can be for me. I don’t think she got it, up to that point. We were speaking about how we all make compromises in the adult world. We have to. I explained to her that if I had my way, I would be doing creative things 16 hours or more, a day. I’m not kidding. Studying art it college, I was a permanent fixture in an around the art department. Always working on something. I get into it and time ceases to exist, y’see. I think you know what I’m talking about. She was legitimately amazed that I would gladly put that amount of time into my art. But we make sacrifices. We love our families and we make sure we’renthere For them. We go to work and do our jobs. There’s a reason they have the term “Starving Artist” after all.

Anyway, my wife isn’t an artist. She doesn’t have that eye or that all-consuming compulsion. And she does get a little bit freaked out when I talk about how I dreamed about a model I’m working on. I don’t give her a hard time about it or bust her chops about it. Everybody is wired differently is all.

And I have a lot of balance in my life. I’m still consumed and I think about my projects a lot, but when I’m playing cars with Vance or catching Cecilia when she’s jumping off the couch to me over and over, I’m thinking about them. And when I’m hanging out with Mrs. Kenny X, of course I’m thinking about her.

But the models always come back to mind and I come back to them. I suppose it could be worse. I mean, I could be abusing hard drugs