I had to take an involuntary break, but...

... today I'm back! Before I get into the modelling stuff, let's talk about the last two days. Yesterday I had an x-ray check-up. The day before I was getting so nervous about it that I couldn't even focus on modelling, so early in the afternoon I gave up and tried to distract myself with other activities. Yesterday, when I came home around noon, I was really tired and just fell asleep. So, what did the x-ray say?

Well, one of my bones, the thicker one, is still broken. I finally saw the x-ray and there's 2 huge titanium plates on each bone, all held together with about 20 screws! And a small chunk of the bone is missing... I don't have a cast anymore, which is so relieving and makes life infinitely easier and overall just... better. I'm not allowed to put weight on it for another 7 weeks though, but I can exercise with my ankle and knee. That's gonna be a real exercise because they feel like someone put a huge amount of superglue inside them! I can already feel a huge difference today, can move my knee from fully stretched to almost 75 degree angle and my foot by about 15 degrees. Of course, the foot is swelled like crazy, looks like a surgical glove filled with water, so I have to rest it frequently. I kinda overdid it today at the workbench and I can really feel the swelling, so it's a lesson for the upcoming weeks! 

To be honest, I feel relieved and slightly bummed out at the same time. But it goes to show how serious the fracture was. I was also concerned about my weight, so being without the cast I finally stepped on the scale and somehow I lost 2 kilograms? Interesting, probably due to the loss of muscle mass in the injured leg... but remaining "static" for 7 more weeks, I'll start doing some upper body exercises just for good measure. 

So yeah, still not fully healed, but I'm more free and flexible, and I'll definitely be able to make a diorama, paint a figure or build another model. So good times ahead, I guess! 

As for the Somua, well, today I tried to catch up, and I'd say it went pretty okay. Mud effects on the lower hull are finished, and I don't think the upper surfaces need too much work. I'll play around with different effects tomorrow, adding more dirt on the fenders, some grime on the engine deck and so on, but nothing drastic. Somehow I really like the contrast between the lower and upper hull! The process was standard... the dry mud layer was followed with Loose Ground and finished off with a mixture of Loose Ground, Wet Effects and Dark Brown Wash. Interestingly, most of the mud isn't blended with enamel thinner. I brushed the darker tones on all the raised parts of the acrylic paste and added more texture with speckling. No brutal streaking effects or other stuff! 

Tracks were very easy to weather. I brushed them with Black Track from VMS, rinsed in soapy water, stippled and speckled the dry tone (Dry Steppe), sanded the polished parts, and then repeated the same with the damp and wet mud mixtures. Fun fact about these Friuls - the Tamiya kit comes with very nice click together workable plastic tracks which don't need any cleanup, but somehow when I was assembling them, they were getting really crooked to the side, to a point where I couldn't fit them on the model and if I tried straightening them, they'd fall apart. Nobody else seemed to have this issue with their model, so there must've been something funny going on here. So my only option was to buy a set of Friuls, which was a good thing in the end, because, let's be honest, plastic tracks would never survive this kind of harsh treatment! 

Well, this was a really long post, but it's all the updates from my modelling and personal life for the past 3 days! 😁