Tank Hull Spaceship part 3

The Tank Hull spaceship had been sitting around at the primer stage since March and with WASMEx 2024 coming up very soon it was time to pull the finger out and get it finished so I would have two models to display the other being the Film Can Spaceship.

Whilst in the midst of construction I came across this illustration by Trevor Webb.

 

This became the inspiration for the paint finish. 
In Photoshop I made up some random shapes with each square being just one pixel.

This was then enlarged with no interpolation to make larger shapes still with the tight corners.
I made up two A4 pages of these random shapes to make some spray masks for the pattern on the surface of the ship in the picture.

I recently purchased a small Silhouette Portrait vinyl cutting machine as it was 30 percent off the new price. It is perfect for just such jobs as this. In its software I then traced the random shape artwork and cut them into Cricut vinyl masking material. These were then extracted from the backing sheet and stuck on the model for airbrushing.

I could use each mask several times only discarding it when it ripped. Perhaps the colour I mixed for the main hull patterns was not quite dark enough so it turned out to be a subtle effect on the model. The pattern colour on the off white striped sections came out a bit more obvious.

I used Lifecolor acrylic paints for the project and then followed that up with a pin wash mixed from Burnt Umber oil paint and odourless turpentine. I drybrushed with a Pale orange mix of acrylic artists paint using a make up brush. I then hand painted some panel chipping with fine brush and a similar colour mixed from hobby acrylics.

Finally it was completed with two days to go before the show which is on this weekend 3rd and 4th of August.

I always look forward to WASMEx as it's a chance to see what the other menbers of our loose Western Australian scifi modeling collective have been up to over the past year and on the Sunday there is a model kit buy and sell where I can usually stock up on a years supply of nurnies for a reasonable price.

Thanks for looking.

More soon...