• Something Dark Is Coming
From start to finish, it took around three weeks to make. The instructions were well-presented and helpful, but that’s not to say it didn’t still require paying close attention to make sure I was doing everything right. There were a few points where it would have been very easy to mix something up and cause a catastrophic oopsie, but thankfully that didn’t happen.
The parts that I struggled with the most were the pelvis piece, the hands, and the feet. The pelvis was a headache because the clearance between parts was so incredibly slim as to necessitate snapping pieces past each other in a way that was quite nerve-wracking. I could easily see the pelvis assembly causing a break in the plastic, but it all turned out fine and dandy in the end. The hands and feet were hard simply because of having a lot of small pieces that were easy to confuse and fiddly to work with.
Surprisingly enough, it was also very difficult to get the color scheme down. Until you start actively trying to pin down the colors, you don’t really notice just how many tiny changes there were to the designs of the Centurions between episodes, I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out they never were exactly the same twice. The quality of the silver would fluctuate between frosted and metallic to mirror-smooth, the gun barrels on the arms change not only their appearance but also their opening mechanism, and the distribution of the metallic gray highlights (low-lights in this case?) can also be seen to change.
I ended up focusing on modeling my one’s color scheme on episodes close to the end of the show, aiming for the ‘final’ design, but even then I don’t think it’s entirely accurate to any particular episode. I tried painting the outer ‘stomach’ section in a slightly less reflective silver, as a compromise between some appearances that have that part plain chrome and others that have it tarnished sliver, or even the same darker metallic gray as found on the joints. It was all very confusing, but that’s the sort of problem that I like to have. Sorting out all the little inconsistencies was very fun.