Rmodeler

Brandon, nice! Like the Dr. says, big sheet of white paper works very well too!

Thanks! Bartster, these were from two 1/25 scale AMT kits that were bought and forgotten about until a recent move. )

Hi guys, I made this Corvette Stingray Sidecar concept out of two AMT kits, cutting apart the fender corners and bringing them back together. The tank, basic engine block and front tire are from an old (Entex?) Kawasaki street bike that I found in the parts box. The PE front disk and two other tires are orphan parts. The rest is scratch built. I turned aluminum wheels, gas cap, instrument pods and trim rings out of aluminum and turned some red toothbrush handle for the tail lights. The instrument faces are just reduced laser prints that were gotten from the VDO website. The front forks are telescoped brass tubing, while the exhausts were bent from solder. My fake display base is balsa wood painted with hardware store speckle paint with a styrene + laser print display panel. Paint is airbrushed Testors Yellow #1114 from the 1/4 oz. glass bottles. Thanks!

hahahaaa Harry

Advice from the old: Andy, you live, you learn. It took me quite some time to learn that chatting on the internet is way different than over a coffee table. Maybe this is not to the bulls eye of the topic, but here's something I always ask myself (after many of my own blog and chatroom gaffes): ----"Can what I've just typed be "heard" in any other way?---- (below, each capitalized word changes the sentence meaning entirely...) WHAT do you mean by that? What DO you mean by that? What do YOU mean by that? What do you MEAN by that? What do you mean by THAT? Great post Andy! I'm proud to have you as a Forum buddy

Dr. Cranky wrote: "Chuck, what is it about being outside with your models you hesitate over?" To that, I add a sidebar---> Beware Shooting in the Full Sun! I took this shot out in the sun when I realized that there IS no light source, other than the sun, that can produce those sharp defined shadows convincingly. I set up the tabletop and "set pieces" outside, put the car and figures in place before I went to the camera to adjust settings. I swear, not more than two minutes later I was set up, framed and ready to go! A small nudge to the car and ... and ... it was hotter than s**t! I quickly moved it to the shade where it cooled. After that, it was frame the shot, put the car and figures in place for a few seconds, expose the film (it was nineties), then move them back to the shade. The sun can be hot! (doh) To the right of my shot is a shot of the real thing. PS: Haha MikeMc, I must have been at least 30 feet tall here!

MikeMc yes... By the way, here's something I've been doing lately ... When I shoot a model I have either a figure model handy (or just a piece if paper will do) that is six scale feet high in the same scale as the subject model. I can then position the center of the lens at that very height so it sees what a six-foot-tall person would see were he/she standing there. Best, Roger

Really nIce shots, Dr ...

Dear GeeBee, I too, love to see a vintage kit come together (although I never have good enough sense to do it myself). I know of Createx but have never tried their products for car modeling, which I will have to do. The colors you have chosen are so, um, British! I love them! It made me think of the subject of car color preferences indexed against a person's nationality. There's lot's of data on this, but this one from Ford seems to cover the bases: http://www.autoblog....ces-by-country/ Nice job so far!

I agree with Ben .. the black VW .. very very lifelike...

Mark, guys hey !! , glad to be here finally ) So to contribute, I have a poser: I made a VW spyder, but the picture as you see it here exists only on computer. I tried everything I knew to make it seem real, and of course the model exists, but the product seems to have accomplished little, because it has no category!

Mike .. I went back to your picture to look at it and I had to re-post. It is fabulous! The roll-up door with chain is totally convincing, the X-brace, the yellow pipes, and the smaller door... it is all quite wow. I can see it looking great with many different kinds of shot angles and lighting too; soft, directional, low-light, sunset whatever... great job!

Ditto to what Virgil just said. Another thing to be sensitive to (which you have done well Mike -- this is for others) is to keep in mind how tall a scale photographer would be. I see lots of model shots taken routinely from what would amount to a scale fifteen or twenty feet above the ground. While shots from high above are not verboten, and can work, a human level shot is sometimes more convincing when it comes to models. Also check out the worm's-eye view (cam on the ground) to give your subject more importance.

Hi, I'm new here. I have to thank all the regulars and in particular Dr. Cranky, for his undying love of the hobby. It really helped me back in to the hobby after a long hibernation. To contribute to this post I thought I'd show a couple of experiments of mine. 1) Andretti Lola T-8800 IndyCar / Warehouse shot: Warehouse image for back ground was a purchased "stock" photo (a few dollars). I made a small tabletop "set" on a card table with consisting of two walls and a colored-paper floor. The walls are laser printouts spray-glued to foam core. The right one has an opening in it where I've used a vertical plastic H-channel and a more printouts to make a half-opened warehouse door with a brick wall outside. 2) Speeding VW Bug: While the IndyCar was a regular shot, this second one was put together in Photoshop. Again, the driver was from stock, as was the forest image. The background was first blurred to show movement, like those real-life "panned" motion shots. Then the car was dropped in, then the driver, and the foreground berm. Lastly, the wheel spokes were blurred radially to give the look of rotation. Question: If someday Photoshop will be as common a tool for modelers as an x-acto knife is now, can a powerful manifulated image of a model which only exists as a computer file, be an end result (as well as the model itself of course)?

Thanks Jim B, nice meet you! The scene is fictitious. In 1985 Jaguar teamed up with British constructor Tom Walkinshaw to develop a V-12 car to contest the Group C World Championship. The XJR-6 was the result. I chose to model what was probably a common scene in the birth of any race car.

Hi, I'm new here. I built this small diorama from a 1/43 scale Provence Moulage metal kit, some balsa, some heavy duty aluminum foil (armco), H-channel Plastruct girders (fence posts) and a little model railroad grass. Hope you enjoy.