Halcyon Alien

Here’s a new one: I have two of these kits. I decided to build one because I loved the way Marcus loved my first one. This is one of those kits which starts out great and then tanks.

The kit is styrene and went together pretty easily. There was a fair amount of puttying and sanding to clean up the seam lines, but Halcyon (may they rest in peace) did good work . I put together the alien figure all but the clear head piece (more on that later) and I didn’t put it on the base.

Forsaking imagination, I went for a paint scheme that was shown on the color painting photo guide which came with the model. Instead of bruised black it was to be organic sienna and browns. I mixed appropriate colors from my collection of Liquitex artist acrylics.

I used my cool new Sotar 20/20 airbrush and used the noodling technique to lay down several shades of the base coat in squiggly thin lines to make up the organic mottled skin. It’s a simple and effective technique. I picked it up from some modeling magazine and saw it demonstrated on David Fisher’s Modelmania 4 video.

I painted the noodling for weeks until it was perfect. I airbrushed highlights and shadows until they were perfect and then (big mistake) I sealed it with Dullcoat and applied an oil wash of burnt umber. Sealing the kit was a good idea, but I should have used a gloss coat, like future, because Dullcoat it porous and the wash just muddied up the perfect paint job I’d done.

I tried to save it with dry brushing and more airbrushing, until my patience ran out, but the kit was never the same.

I painted the teeth and then turned to the base. The base is really very boring, and I struggled to make it look cool. I basecoated it with black and then airbrushed layers of silver and copper to give it warmth, depth and interest. I’m very pleased with it.

The last thing I did was apply the clear head piece. If you don’t know yet about my eternal conflict with clear plastic model pieces, you haven’t read much on Nugax. I used a little superfine grit wet sand paper and plastic polish to clear up some minor blemishes. I polished too hard and cracked the @#%@!@#$ piece. No fix available. I thought of keeping it off, but thought that the crack wasn’t overly noticeable and I liked the way the piece looked on the color picture I was following. So I glued it in place. It sucks.

I hate it. It looks positively tacked on, with no connection to the alien. He’s wearing some kind of glass beanie. I’ve contemplated using the airbrush to blend the piece into the head, make it look like it belongs there, but my patience for the model has slipped away. I have a hundred waiting to be built, you know, including another of these.