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jayne-hecate-writer · 3 years

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A whole new me-ish...

Dear friends, it has been so long and I have become a new person! Well, no, not really. I'm still me. I still have a filthy mouth and a foul mind, but writing has taken a back seat to the other things I have started creating.

Since the Covid lock down I have been experimenting with model making and painting, taking a particular interest in lighting said models with LEDs, better known among us nerds as Light Emitting Diodes. LEDs come in many shapes and sizes, plus they produce a very good variety colours, they also draw relatively little power and finally, they can be run from a watch battery. As you can see, there is lots to like with LEDs, but there is a downside, to them if you want to use a lot, for a start you need to use more power than you get from a watch battery. Connecting LEDs to a larger battery pack or power supply is a great way to pop them completely, or build them up into a slowly failing system. The way to avoid doing this is to use a resistor, to reduce current flow into the LED and prevent it burning out. Calculating the value of resisters is fairly simple, but I have to reply on the resistors I can salvage from the various pieces of broken equipment I have access to. In this case, I was able to scavenge the resisters and LEDs from the three broken printers I had in my stocks of trash electronics.

Now speaking of F**king printers, I made a discovery while taking apart my failed Cannon printer/scanner. It had a reservoir inside where the ink got dumped during use. Basically, it had a series of tubes that took the ink from the head and dumped it into a wads of cotton wool at the back of the machine, that made the inside of the printer case absolutely filthy with wasted ink. The two HP printers I dismantled, did not have this system and it led me to wonder, was this the cause of the constant need to replace ink in the Canon? Was it really continuously pumping horrifically expensive ink into the waste bin? If this was the case, what a terribly wasteful system and I can confirm that having seen this system, I will never buy a Canon printer again. I am sure that it had another purpose, other than to rapidly waste ink, but it was a terrible system in which a brand new ink cartridge lasted less than a week.

My model projects started fairly simply, with a small Hotwheels car that I found and then painted, as reported in a previous blog post on here. The second model was a scratch built Star Wars Pod Racer, made from recycled bubble bath bottles, hand sanitiser bottles and bottle tops. Again I fitted different coloured LEDs to resemble engine glow and the strange energy binding that holds the jet engines together. I made the base from scrap wood and cardboard and added stones and pebbles from the garden, all covered with a Papier-mâché and baking soda. The paint was acrylic from the local cheap shop and it is surprisingly good.

From here I moved onto another hotwheels car, this time with a zombie theme and full LED lights. I went on-line and found an inch tall figure from the TV show Walking Dead, who was a character called Daryl. In the show he wore a lot of black leather black leather according to the photos I found on line and in this case, used a large kitchen cleaver. With model railway grass and another twig from the garden to look like a felled tree, the scene was set and I was very proud of this creation. So much so in fact, that I gifted it to a very dear friend of mine who like me loves a good zombie movie.

The next project was a repair and build for a Snap On Tools branded toy break down truck that my lovely wife had been given along with a set of Snap On sockets she bought when she was working as a motorcycle mechanic. Over the years, the truck had been played with by children, dropped into toy boxes and it was looking really rather second hand. The wing mirrors, door handles, rear facing lights and both cranes needed repairing or replacing and I sculpted the replacements parts from superglue and baking soda or from lumps of solder, all of which I carved with files and a scalpel. The broken parts were repaired and finally the truck was stripped down to the component parts and thoroughly cleaned, before being put back together. Once the truck was finished, it really needed a place to sit, so I designed a garage from the 1950s for it to sit in, with an old style petrol pump and a couple of oil barrels.

The petrol pump was a 1/24 scale resin model kit purchased on line and the rest of the garage was built using recycled cardboard and lollypop sticks. I used a series of garden stones and then a tub of sand brought back from Bermuda by a close family friend, some time ago. The sand was a lovely pink colour, made up crushed coral and shells. It is perfect for modelling because it is not the boring granular sand of my local beach, which is gritty, fine and easily wind blown sand. By this time I was experimenting with colour washes, applied to painted base coats. The depth of the colour achieved is just lovely and the lighting effects really bring out the glow of the paint. With the garage finished, a few Easter egg details were added that only the most observant nerd will notice. But there was still a large hole in the model that needed to be filled somehow. Dearest wifey went web browsing found a scale model of a Vincent Black Shadow motorcycle and it fitted perfectly into the gap, to be illuminated by a soft white LED. Once finished, I could not have been more pleased than when Wifey took the model and plugged it in. Oh yes, this time I had used a PSU or power supply unit with a timer circuit to run the LEDs as a night light in our hallway to the bathroom. Given how many of the LEDs I had used to light the garage forecourt, the shop window and parking bay, mains power was really the only option. On this occasion, I purchased a set of pre-wired LEDs that already had a resister fitted in series with the LED, meaning that it is safe to run them on the mains power.

My next model was a Motorcycle diorama, a classic Kawasaki Zephyr, a model kit found on e-Bay that was then imported from Japan. The kit was perfectly formed, it was hard to believe that they had been moulded from plastic, however the detail was so fine, my old eyes needed a magnifying glass to see them clearly for paint or glue. Once the bike was fully assembled, I built a small ten centimetre squared street scene, with a graffiti covered wall and a drink machine for the bike to sit with. The Pepsi dispensing machine was purchased from e-Bay yet again, for just a few pennies and it is beautifully printed onto photo-paper, meaning that the finished model when assembled is exquisite. The nearly completed model once again needed something else and I was at a loss of what to do. Yet the thought of lights never strays far from my mind and I designed a street lamp with an orange glow to look like an old sodium lamp. My childhood was spent in the gloom of sodium lamps, both here and abroad, when catching ferries at four in the morning to travel across Europe. The lamppost was made from a sliver of scrap wood and some tissue paper to give it a concrete like texture, with two orange LEDs secreted in the head. Once finished, I was not overly happy with the result, but by that time, it was too late to go back. The lighting effect was really nice though, but the weathering and fake litter were really effective additions, making it look like the bike was parked on double yellow lines in a very run down city street.

This led (snigger) me into my most recent model, another Star Wars inspired diorama, this time in 1/18 scale, with Hasbro Clone Trooper action figures and an old, rather broken Maisto motorbike. Normally, Star Wars has little to do with motorcycles, but while filming the Obi Wan Kenobi series, Ewan McGreggor was photographed during a break, sitting on his own motorcycle reading a copy of a motorcycle newspaper, while in his full Obi Wan costume. This was all the inspiration I needed and I found that the broken motorcycle model was just the right size for the action figures. Once again, I devised a plan, found the LEDs and used the parts from my destroyed printers. I even managed to use the scanner light head, at first using a variable resistor to adjust the glow. Sadly I over ran the strip and the LEDs burned out. Luckily I had a spare to play with and used a recovered resistor to run it instead. This has the opposite problem to the variable resistor which had too little resistance, being too high a resistance to allow a full glow from the strip of LEDs. I gave one of the Clone Troopers a bong made to look like it was made from the leg of a battle droid, with a flickering orange resister to show the burning spice in the bowl. The other clone was given a spray can of bright blue spray paint, modelled from plastic scraps and superglue. Again, once the model scenery was constructed, I really enjoyed the weathering and dirtying of the street. The washes have made all of the plastic parts look like rusted metal girders or filthy litter soiled streets or heavily corroded chemical pipes. I absolutely love the process of weathering, taking something shiny, well painted and nice looking and turning it into something filthy, damaged and rusted, with just a few washes of colour and stain.

So this is what I have been doing, as well as writing the occasional short story for a Christmas book release, editing the writing club book in time for another Christmas release and even working on the sequel to my first novel, Letitia. So how does this make me a new person? Well, I have finally embraced the fact that I am an artist and I absolutely love playing with paint. I may not be able to draw particularly well and I certainly cannot sculpt in clay or stone, but I can build and paint model scenes scratch build my own kits from trash to compliment the model kits or other parts acquired else where. I have to be honest, it is all such fun.

#diorama #scratchbuilt #starwars #hotwheels #hasbro #clonewars #electronics #art #newartist #painting #modelmaking #snap-on-tools #art-from-scrap #recycledart

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