Andy's Modelmaking Misadventures

[Andy in Germany]

I've been putting this off for ages: it's time for Georgetown to get a hotel. Of course, being me, I'm making it complicated.

 

[Reynard]

Is this Havana? After Havana, Cuba?

 

[Andy in Germany]

Is this Havana? After Havana, Cuba?

Yes. For some reason I added an 'n'.

It will hopefully resemble the "Hotel Angleterre" (also spelled wrong, I suspect) in Havana, so I thought it was only appropriate to name it accordingly.

 

[Reynard]

Yes. For some reason I added an 'n'.

It will hopefully resemble the "Hotel Angleterre" (also spelled wrong, I suspect) in Havana, so I thought it was only appropriate to name it accordingly.

Not spelled wrong

 

[Punkawallah]

Will the Hotel break the Ascension mould and have matching front & rear architecture?

 

[Andy in Germany]

Will the Hotel break the Ascension mould and have matching front & rear architecture?

Of course not: the back will be shoddy brick and drainpipes. No money in nice architecture the patrons won't see.

 

[Andy in Germany]

Testing the new model room lighting with a game. It seems to be okay, although it's a bit strong and I have to keep moving lights about. Will have to work on a diffuser.

 

[Andy in Germany]

Back in April Beautiful Daughter wanted to make something, so we built a new module for the harbour wall. This sat on the shelf waiting for a family visit, and last week we finally had time to work on it again.

Here Beautiful Daughter can be seen adding a wash to make it appropriately dirty, which involved learning about how washing up liquid breaks surface tension in water, and the useful applications of this property.

We didn’t get as much done as I’d planned, mostly because it was a very warm week, so we spent most of our time playing in the river that runs past the flat, and building a real dam from pebbles.

We’ll finish the harbour next time…

 

[Andy in Germany]

These lads have been infesting my “half finished figures” shelf for far too long, so it was time to finally paint them.

I originally thought they may provide a bit of variety for the “Royal Navy Air Service” police force, but for now they’ll be “sentries” guarding different installations, either as “extras” in a game or possibly turning up and potentially raising the alarm at an inopportune moment.

The “unfinished figures” shelf is pretty full, because I have to make a couple of leagues for some new storylines now that the 40 Elephants Gang have finally been booted off the island, so expect more figure painting in the future…

 

[Andy in Germany]

Charles Vane has been in the background of these stories or some time, as the new “Proprietor” of the abandoned whisky distillery, financial backer of several enterprises on Ascension Island, and latterly a new competitor in “The Races”.

Although I am quite happy to use soviet era cars as British police vehicles, and field highly improbable monowheels in race events, I’m irrationally fussy about how specific characters should look in the game. I had a mental image of Charles Vane being dressed in a tweed suit with a bowler hat and a riding crop, clearly wealthy and fairly flamboyant, rather like a Terry-Thomas character. Unlike Terry-Thomas (who by all accounts was very well liked by his peers) Vane is also a rather nasty thug.

I found a “racing” figure for the character entirely by accident, so a rather windswept version has turned up first in “the races” driving an imported Bugatti racing car, but it took several false starts to source a “normal” version before someone suggested, of all things, a figure depicting Wyatt Earp.

It’s a little ironic that a model of an icon of the American Wild West is now a member of the British aristocracy,* but I’ll go with what works. Now I need to build up a gang to do his bidding in the (badly) organised crime scene of Ascension Island.

*Allegedly.