Imperial Knights, Part II

I didn’t make a lot of forward motion this week.  Part of it was just shortness of time (I’m right on that line of being just on time and falling behind with an important deadline).  Part of it was hitting one of the first bumps in this project as I had to figure a few things out.

But let’s look at what there is and next week I’ll have some more.

First thing I did was the smokestacks for the top of the engine stacks.  They’re worth spending a bit of time on because they work off an interesting design that crops up a few times in this template.  It took me a few minutes to figure it out, but once I did I was kind of awed by the creator’s solution to the detail issue.

In the past, when I wanted to add detail to an engine or gun barrel, I’d start with an octagonal tube and add strips of curved card around it to “smooth out” the design a bit.  In this template, it’s all done as one piece.  I just cut it out and roll it.  The detail pieces are longer, so they build up higher.  It’s very clever.

Since a lot of this detail is 2D though—just images on the paper—I decided to take it a bit further.  The circular vents on the smokestack are almost exactly 1/8”, so I took a few minutes to line up my hole punch and actually make them.  When the detail wraps around, they’ll have flat card beneath them just like the vents on the back of the engine stack.

I wound each of the long pieces around my knife to give them a good bend.  Then I glued the tab first to form the base and held it for a minute or two.  Once it felt secure, I wrapped the second half of it around.  I made sure to pull it tight so there weren’t any odd gaps between the two layers.  It’s tricky because pulling too hard will tug the tab loose (as I discovered), so don’t be too frustrated if this takes two or three attempts. 

Once it was all in place, I tapped the top and bottom on the table a few times to make sure everything was sitting flush.  I also squished the sides a bit to get it as close to round as possible.  I held each one for about five minutes to make sure they were solid.

I decided to move on to the head next.  It’s a very small piece, and it doesn’t help that its outlines are pale gray on white paper.  It’s also very intricate.  I spent about twenty minutes cutting the whole piece out.

Helpful Hint—If you’re going to peel the paper off like I do, take a moment and trace over these lines with a sharp pencil or fine pen.  Your eyes will thank you for it later.  My eyes are cursing me because I didn’t think of it until I was done...

At this point it became how small the head was in relation to the torso.  It also has no real detail on it aside from 2D eyes.  I wanted to mull this over for a bit, so I moved on the extremely slow process of cutting out the Knight’s hood.  It’s a piece with a lot of very thin sections.  I’d hoped I’d be able to alter it’s shape a bit, give it that little “bill” in the front that the new GW version has, but that would involve additions, not alterations.

As I studied the template and some of the images go the finished model, it struck me that I could add a second hood inside the larger one.  It would fill up some space and bring this closer to the GW model.  It was also clear I’d have to start with the head and build out.

And this was where I decided to stop and mull on things a bit more.  I cut out the “neck” and some of the shoulder pieces, just to have some more pieces ready to go, but I stopped assembling things until I had a better sense of where I was going with this.