Old Dominion Open - IPMS Richmond

On February 25th I attended Old Dominion Open Hobby Show, hosted by IPMS Richmond.
It was good show, a lot of good models on the tables, and quite impressive vendors' area.
As always it was great occasion to meet some old friends, and make some new ones.
The only unhappy  thing was how armor categories were divided :( My beloved braille scale armor was joined with 1/48th scale in Tracked Armor Vehicles, and to make it worse in Armored Cars, Softskin and Artillery categories it was placed together with 1/35th. Very unfortunate decision, which may keep away braille scale modelers from this show.
However I was quite lucky, and 3 of my models received awards in other categories.

28mm Demolition Team

1/72 Fighting For Vodka!

1/35 M4 Early Sherman, Italy, 1944 

It was good start of 2012 season, and I hope it will get better along the way.

1/35 M4 Sherman Early Tamiya - Completed

After previous episode I had Sherman sealed and ready for the DIRT & MUD TIME. First I built up layers of mud with different tones, with help of AK Interactive products. To achieve volume of it, I mixed them with white plaster (Plaster of Paris). When all the layers dried up, I added some more dust using various pigments. At the end, despite my earlier resolution, I eventually decided to make small base for Sherman.

28mm Mordor Stormtrooper

While ago I received from a friend bag full of 1/72 figures (Thanks Micha!). For my surprise, among them, I found metal figure from Games Workshop's Lord of the Rings series. Figure looked incomplete, and for some time I had no clue what to do with it. One day, while browsing through some remnants from 1/35 scale figures, I found some weapons, bags and pouches, and I got an idea. How about modernizing the guy to Stormtrooper?

1/35 M4 Sherman Early Tamiya - Workbench Part 4

While working on Firefly, I also gave some attention to bigger Sherman. I slowly started weathering process, which is in its very initial stage. I applied oil wash and first filter from Winton artistic oils.

1/72 Sherman Firefly Vc Dragon - Workbench Part 4

Since Firefly build is coming close to an end, I decided to start working on the base for it. I sculpted base it using DAS (air drying sculpting clay). After shaping general terrain layout, I added tracks impression on the ground, with DS tracks from another Firefly... It still needs some more detail, but here's general idea of it.