Rightio, so I believe last time I was just about to get up to painting. Well, there’s not much to say here I suppose – here’s a photo of me painting stuff:

That wallpaper is pretty cool, by the way. Anyway, at the moment I’m painting the black bits black and everything else can wait until later. Here’s the front:

What may be less apparent in this photo is that I’m dipping the three prongs from the back of the goal triangle in some green paint. You can also kind of see that I’m holding the wooden curvy bit in my other hand. The reasons for all of this are ingenious, and explained in the next photo:

So, now my cunning plan comes together. By marking the base with green paint from the pegs, I can now drill holes there of the appropriate size and fit them into the wooden base. I actually took kind of decent photos of this, so I’ll let them do the talking.

Okay this is awesome. The pegs fit into the holes so well that I could actually hold the whole thing by the base, or the triangle bit, without them falling apart. I’m pretty surprised that worked so well, actually. I’ll still glue them in, but it’s nice to be able to see roughly how this is going to look.

Anyway, that’s enough painting there for the moment. The other things that need painting are the curvy wooden bases. My plan here is to undercoat with black paint, then mix up some grey (I bought red, green, blue, yellow, white, and black paint) to put over it. There’s not really much to say here, but I’ve provided some action shots anyway.

You might think, based on this photo, that I have cleverly masked out the base of the trophy so I don’t accidentally get paint all over the pretty wooden base. But you’d be wrong, because it was in fact my girlfriend, Halley, who did that, using her amazing artist skills. This is nothing though – the masking necessary for the goal triangle is even cooler. But before we get to that, one last thing. I realised, after painting this thing with about five layers of grey paint, that one of the edges was unacceptably uneven. I figured I should be as much of a perfectionist as was necessary for the recipient of the trophy to finish all the secret levels, so I once again grabbed the whittling knife and went back to the chopping section of the project:

Anyway, long story short: It took a surprising amount of re-paintings to make the colour of the freshly whittled bit smooth with the rest of it, but the upside of so many coats of paint is that the bits where I screwed up slightly have been thoroughly concealed by paint now. But, I got there in the end.

Somewhere during all of this, I had been asking around regarding some competent people who might like to laser etch some name plates for these things. A friend of mine recommended the good people at 5 Star Trophies, and I got in touch. Before long, they had sent me the following bundle of goodness:

Now, I made a mistake here. I was expecting to be screwing these things to the front, so I asked them to put holes in, but that turned out to be both problematic and unnecessary, since the screws wouldn’t sit flush and it looked crummy, plus I can get the plates with sticky stuff on the back and that will do a good job of holding things in place. After ruining a few of the above pictured plates, I gave up and re-ordered them without the holes. 5 Star Trophies gave me the second set half price, too, so that was nice of them.

The exciting thing here is that now, I’m able to finish two of the trophies! The two simpler ones, for all the gold medals (just a car on a base) and for the coop levels (two cars ‘high fiving’ on a base, have all their parts assembled. The bases are good to go, the nameplates are ready, now I just have to drill holes and glue stuff in. Here’s a hideous monstrosity that I created while practicing various methods of screwing things together:

The tricky bit was drilling the holes for the car prongs just the right distance apart, so the car would sit in there reasonably tightly and not fall out, but I got there in the end. All I have to do is the same thing on the real trophy base, apply a sticker, and…

This was a pretty exciting milestone because this whole process has taken ages. And what’s more, the coop trophy is also finishable with a similar amount of work – in fact, it’s easier, because I have slightly more wiggle room for the hole placement.

Okay! So, two down, two to go! And one of the remaining two is all but finished at this point. Unfortunately, the remaining paint job is by far the most daunting. Plus, I’ve got to figure out a way to package these things so that they don’t get destroyed in transit. For the exciting conclusion, you’ll have to read the next entry, coming up right now.