Xmas is here already?!

No idea where that year went.  Good grief.

My wife and daughter have been having a bit of fun painting up the Santa’s Workshop (from MakeCNC)

My first time, I hit a bit of a snag, as I used the 6mm plans by mistake and still cut it from 3mm MDF (which is the model above).

Since then however (and despite the warning to the contrary), I’ve been quite successfully making the workshop from 3mm MDF, using a 1/16″ router bit from Toolstoday.com.

It is a fun kit to assemble (and paint if you have the patience).

As you can also see in the first photo, I gave Frosty a treatment as well, using an airbrush for the most part (he was already fully assembled that made it a bit tricky).  My suggestion for him would be to assemble the hat, then paint it, but then paint the rest of the snowman while still in pieces.

I used acrylic paint for this job, which goes on quite well on MDF, although MDF is like working with rough cardboard.  Doesn’t pay to rush the painting either, but seeing as the year has finished before I realised it had begun, I did anyway just to get the job done.

I am still in two minds about painting the models – they do look good painted, but equally, they offer a different quality in their raw state.  Like looking at a scene and deciding if it is better depicted in a colour photograph, or a black and white one.

Certainly for the Xmas decoration aspect, the painted model wins hands-down.  Next time I’ll have to think about how to run some fibre optic lighting through the place!

I obviously have a young daughter – while painting Frosty, I kept getting an adapted line running through my head from a certain movie

“Do you want to paint a snowman?”