Did more work over this last weekend, specifically Saturday and Sunday evenings. I had some small searchlights from a Tamiya (I think it was) 1/700 scale set that I was putting on the upper aft section - there are two items up there on the studio model which appear to be some sort of dish antenna, possibly. I figured these were good substitutes for those since I don't have any tiny dish antenna. I had three which were a large-ish size and five which were smaller. Between my meat hooks and tweezers, I kept "flinging" parts all over my room - one of the fellas at Resin Illuminati calls it the "Tweezer Launch"! Wasted the better part of an hour with parts flying, me stopping for five to ten minutes to look for the part and then finally managed to not lose the last couple of searchlights. I added a couple of other small parts in two spots, as well.
That was all around 1am-ish. Temps outside were below freezing - right about 24F - so I decided not to shoot the last coat of primer on her. The garage is obviously warmer than outside, but still was only about 40F, I think. I shot the last coat of primer on her Sunday morning and hit her w/the first base coat w/in about thirty minutes of the primer fully curing.
Anyhow, a few more pics. First one is prior to the base coat being applied. The later pics show it w/the base coat. I used Tamiya AS-2, IJN Light Gray. It's a bit darker than I'd have preferred, but it's too late now.
First Pic - Pre-base coat, showing two of the additional parts. On the upper neck I had added one of the extra guns for the 1/3700 Berzerk that I was able to purchase from Fantastic Plastic. I've since removed that and replaced it w/a 1/700 wet-navy part - I think it was a gun sighting turret or something along those lines from the US Navy, WWII Era. I also added a casting from the upcoming ARVEY Model Products Battlestar Accurizing Kit, mastered by Marko Osterholtz. I added that part to the same area it would normally go, as the kit part in that section was a bit... bland... for my tastes. I mean no insult to Scott Spicer who mastered this awesome kit, but I just thought that the part I had on-hand looked better, adding a bit more depth for my own tastes.
Second Pic - Shows the base coat applied and the first bits of a dark wash I've applied. Yes, it's before masking and painting the areas w/the Insignia Red for the stripes. I wanted to see how it would look w/the wash and think it looks a lot better as the base color sort of "dulls down" the detail. The wash makes it snap out, IMNSHO. You can also see the part on the upper back neck that I added. I know on the studio model it's some sort of Russian ZSU part, IIRC. Or at least, it looks like the quad-mounted gun turret from a ZSU. I'm still looking at the possibility of adding some sort of gun barrels using sewing pin parts, clipped to the length that I need. This part also has dish antenna on the top.
Third Pic - Is a slightly better lit shot, w/a bit more of an angle, after some more wash was added. I plan to mask off the areas on the starboard side and paint them a bit later tonight. I've got three screaming girls here in the house along w/my two sons, so I'm very likely to get pretty distracted while trying to finish this. Once I've got the stripes painted on it and I'm happy w/the rest of it, I plan to add the decals. After that will come another black wash, then some light weathering w/dark grays, I think - and of course, the dullcote seal.
She'll be Galactica, I've decided. If I follow thru on my plan to purchase a second TOS Battlestar kit, I think I'll add some guns to her in a couple of different spots and name her Pegasus. I like to think that Commander Cain managed to pull the Pegasus out at the last second, jumping to light speed. She limped back to The Colonies, sent some teams in to the remains of the shipyards and other Fleet ships, found some scrap materials and even some un-used guns, missiles and other munitions and re-armed.
I started painting the red stripes on The Big G Monday. One change I decided to make, tho - I chose to use the elongated strips above each set of launch tubes for the red stripes on the Flight Pods instead of going with the actual, accurate stripes. It just makes sense to me that those stripes might be there as a set of warning stripes for those launch tubes.
:shrug: Makes sense to me, anyhow.
BTW, the pic makes them look much brighter than they look IRL.
I had to put some fresh base coat paint down, tho, as I got a little over-zealous w/the use of a toothpick in removing excess paint in two areas. The first was along the top of the most forward stripe on the flight pod. The other was in trying to remove some excess black wash that had sort of pooled up in two spots. Both of these over-applications caused the base coat to come up, with one of them come up all the way to the primer. The other was only what appeared to be one layer of paint, as I'd put to coat on her, both as thin as I could get using spraybombs.
The other ship in the pic is a kitbash I did using an old R-M battlestar kit. I call it the Hades-class destroyer. Not built as a traditional destroyer in the same sense of how we utilize the term for wet-navy use, but meant to indicate that it's designed as an anti-basestar ship with huge-honkin' guns in the front. More pics later, tho, as I'll create a separate thread just for her.
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