Recharging Batteries

It's been awfully quiet around the the blog, lately, as I've been taking a pause from my own design projects to work on something very cool, and a bit outside my comfort zone just for the fun of building something cool.  

For the past six years, most of my time spent on my hobby has been put toward either creating brand new subjects or repainting and refining older models, and all of the building I'd done over that period had been related to that.  In fact, during my design work on the DS9 runabout, I built the same wing section over two dozen times, the vintage car project required a test build of each of the 50+ versions I designed, and my ongoing Federation Frigate project has required enough test builds to fill two bankers boxes.  Not that I'm complaining, as I believe that the process of test-building a model is an integral part of the design process, but all that repetition had left me a bit... unmotivated, and often frustrated to the point where I was repeating mistakes.  I was so caught up in trigonometry and the math of creating models that I had forgotten that it was supposed to be fun.  

I needed a break from what had become routine, so I've taken a bit of a sabbatical, in the form of a new model from Julius Perdana, owner of the site Paper-Replika.com.  Now anyone who has been in the paper model hobby for more than 20 minutes is familiar with Julius' rather prolific body of work.  He is known around the world for designing some of the best, and often biggest, paper models on the internet, and I have to admit that I have often been completely intimidated by the scope of some of his designs.  But not this time.
I've jumped into this one with both feet and am completely enjoying the break from the norm. 

So far, I've gotten the head and torso sections completed, and have moved on to the legs, which are still a work-in-progress.  Here are a few photos of what's been done, so far...

The head of the model, which is the first assembly section, with a quarter for scale...

Inner structure of the torso.

Rear view of the torso with the repulsor pack taking shape

The completed torso with the poseable head in place

Inner structure of the hips, where the legs will attach. (shown upside-down) This part, build from heavy cardboard, was colored black before final assembly.

Standing on its own two feet.  This is as far as I've gotten until now.  The feet are well-along and the inner structures of the poseable legs are all ready.  Work will continue with adding more detail parts to the feet, and adding the outer sections of both legs, before printing and assembling the arms and finishing the model.