The Art of Concealment

There is a saying that has stuck with me…. “We don’t make mistakes, just happy little accidents.” –Bob Ross

Despite your opinion of Mr. Ross this quote is an outstanding bit of wisdom, that while he was referring to the art of oil painting; this, in my opinion, should be applied to every day life. Its meaning is that ‘mistakes’ aren’t really mistakes at all, but rather an opportunity for exploration.

For this post I’m applying it to our Games Workshop hobby… Obviously!

In the picture above, take note of the gap between the tread armour plate at the front of the vehicle and the side armour plate with the Ultramarines hatch. What happened here was a horizontal misalignment of the side plate creating a gap between the plates that gets increasingly larger towards the top like a V.  Click to enlarge the picture to see it a little better.

In my exploration into how to correct this I finally decided to try and conceal it. But how? I came across a bit that I wouldn’t normally have used (Fact is I originally thought the bit was ugly.), a grouping of purity seals, but in this case however, it was perfect for this application. The placement of this single bit was enough to help hide the worst part of the gap, making the two armour plates look more properly aligned.

You may also have noticed that between the hatch and the sponson mount the skull & cross bones has been removed and in its place a terminator cross. This is the result of an accident where I failed to fully research a product and ended up chemically melting some of the plastic. With the original skull & cross bones horribly distorted it needed removed and in doing so opened up an opportunity for exploration as to how I could fix it. The terminator cross is from the Forge World Ultramarines icon pack and in my opinion looks 1000x better.  So I repeated it on the other side.

So the moral of the post is; don’t fret when you have an accident, think about how you can use the accedent to your advantage; use it to follow a path you would not have other wise followed. I'm willing to bet that most of the simple details that we see on masterfully crafted models that look like they were done on purpose were actually little accidents that ended up turning into something great.

The pursuit of perfection leads to madness. Cheers!