Keel's Tale

Do you remember Legos? I loved Legos, snapping those little feet destroyers together was the highlight of many weekends I had as a kid. Building minis is akin to building a sky scrapper (or spaceship) out of Legos, kind of.

You start with a sprue and some directions; just like those kits we all had with one exception: You gotta cut the parts out, and glue them together to assemble the model. It’s not too difficult a couple quick snips and you’ve freed the head. However, you must remove the mold lines. What are mold lines?

Glad you asked! The process the manufacturer makes the minis is with two halves of a mold. Where the two halves meet is the mold line. There are many ways to get the mold lines off, some use a sanding stick. Some scrape it off with an X-ACTO blade, but I prefer a dulled razor blade.

The dulled razor blade has some disadvantages like any other tool, for example I can’t get into small nooks and cranes on the model (For that I use a dull X-ACTO blade). The advantages are it is relatively difficult to damage the model (You’d have to put a lot of force onto it) yet it still offers an edge to scrape the mold line away. Additionally, you can quickly remove long sections of mold lines with quick back and forth motions.

The first piece I decided to assemble was the left leg. Because I needed a solid foot to stand on… Normally minis legs are one piece, but this leg came in two parts. After assembling the leg and looking at the other bits I realized that the Arch-Revenant is a tree person!

I’m going to have to do a little bit more kitbash work than I first thought but for now I’ll build it to see what I’m working with. After assembling the back, two legs I ended up with the below:

I was considering gluing the torso to the back, but I would cover up a lot of the cape and the backside of the leg (see below). So, the first executive decision was made; I’m going to paint them then glue them together. This offers advantages and disadvantages. Advantages, I’ll be able to paint them easily independently. Disadvantages, if I do any blending work after I glue them together, I’ll have to go over the joined areas and make sure the blends don’t abruptly change. That would be jarring to the eye and unpleasant to look at.

With over half of the main assembly done seems like a good stopping point. Next, I’ll tackle the head and arms. As mentioned in the first post (I think), I don’t like the horns so it will be a bit more MacGyver-ish with the kitbashing.