Thank you for the welcome - I met Arkangel the other weekend and he brought me in!
I've worked a fair bit with resin by now (mostly with FW tank and renegade conversion kits), but this will be my first super-heavy build in resin. First of many, now that I finally have armies and opponents with collections large enough to venture into Apocalypse (i.e. I love the hobby, but Iove the game, so I need to balance both ends).
Last night I continued working on the gun turret. It is a tricky build, as the stages are intermingled. By that I mean the gun mount, cradle, and gunner need to be finished (as seen above) before inserting into the gun tower. However, the canopy needs a bit of green stuff work to fit properly with its base, so I needed to dry fit the whole assembly, paint the interior, glue the windshields (FW didn't include any clear film, so I cleaned and sliced up some blister packs I had lying around), and mask the windshields before actually starting the assembly.
The exposed gun mount and heavy bolters means that once assembled, I'll either have to go for an intense masking job, or forgo the air brush on this sub-assembly and hand paint the gun turret. Any thoughts on this? I'm pretty confident that I'll be able to hand paint diluted layers well enough for the section not to stand out from the airbrushed hull - but a keen eye will always notice such things.
As for conversion / detail plans I'll be looking at small things as I go along - mostly withe aim of subtle personalization. I am more than happy enough to master the basic build and I know there will be more builds in the future so I have no need to go crazy. On the other hand, if anybody spots something and thinks of a cool suggestion I'm happy to take in onboard for consideration. There are, however, a few practical things that I'll handle - such as making to sets of landing gear with magnets so I can choose between an airborne and landed configuration.