Construction: Han Solo in Carbonite, part 8

A big day! Finally things start coming together.

Waking up to a sunny day, I decided to make a big push towards the finish. I lay duct tape in a border around the edge of the board and then started spreading out watered-down Filler to make the swirly background. Annoyingly, I ran out before I got to the end so had to pop to Poundland to buy some more...which they didn't have.

After much swearing, and not wanting to spend silly money on filler from Homebase, I bought some filler for one of those cartridge guns. Once home, I emptied out the entire tube, watered that down, and began spreading.

The consistency was a little runnier then my usual Filler, which, at the time, annoyed me no end, but proved a plus later. Being really runny, I poured it in blobs straight from the container onto the board and pretty much left it as it dripped. The final result looks a lot better than when I was trying to spread the thicker stuff, but it took fracking ages to dry (well, hours compared with the minutes of the other stuff).

I pulled up the duct tape and then smoothed over more of the runny filler around the frame, in the hope that it'd cover some of the wood grain. It hasn't really worked, but the thought was there.

With everything still very wet, hopes were fading that I'd get to use the Halfords spray paint, that I'd also bought while out, today.

Eventually, however, it did seem more or less dry enough. Spurred on by impatience, a fear the weather wouldn't be nice again for the rest of the year, and not wanting to move the build in and out of the garage more than I had to (I'd managed to knock off a thumb in the process of getting it outside), I got out the paint!

First I actually did the sensible thing of giving it a coat of primer. This was 500ml of Halford's cheapest grey primer and more or less covered the entire thing. A second coat would probably have been a good idea, but, hey! at least I'd given it a bit of a base.

While the base coat was drying, my son pointed out that the hands were too smooth compared to everything else. He was definitely right. With a small screwdriver, I scraped away a bit of detail to the hands and added a bit of Filler just to roughen things a little. They still aren't perfect, mostly thanks to them being born from some rubber gloves, but they were certainly improved after the adjustment.

Finally on with a 500ml can of Halford's cheapest silver spray. This easily covered the whole model and I ensured I kept a little back just in case.