Stretched Sabre Spaceship part 4

The Stretched Sabre spaceship project has finally reached the primer stage.

I completed the second wing and added some detailing in a few spots where there were holes that needed covering.

The other additions were two stubby winglets which are the conning towers from the submarine kits being used in the Space Barge project.

The model was then masked up and sprayed with multi surface primer ( which hopefully wont come off) and the pilot figure was painted, not very well, but good enough.

 

It looks to me like the back wall of the intake may need some sort of grill detail as its just a plain flat surface at the moment.

Next job is to come up with a suitable colour scheme.

I also came across a picture of the book that the Fred Gambino cover artwork adorns. this artwork was the original inspiration for this project.

 

Thanks for looking.

More soon...

Science Vessel AKA Old Unfinished Spaceship Part 2

 I last worked on this old model from the 1990's in September 2019. I never liked the original front and at some stage I made a modification the front and didn't like that either so the project sat around neglected for decades. In  2019 I hacked off the front end and started building a new one making a third version. Inevitably I didn't like that one any better and so the project lay dormant once again.

Below is the model with the third attempt at a command section in 2019. Everything in grey primer dates from the mid 1990's. See the part 1 for the 2019 work done on this project and this historical introduction of the model as it originally was.

 

Just recently I had another idea of what to do with it, combining a cockpit from an amphibious vehicle kit I have had saved away for a future project. Why I hadn't thought of using this kit cockpit for this project before I can't fathom. I had been thinking about a project I could use the cockpit shape for and in a sudden flash of inspiration I thought of this old spaceship project.

First thing was to draw up some rough thumbnails to firm up the concept in my head.

 The first concept was the middle and bottom sketches which show a flat panelled shape rather like a large sized Y-wing. Given that the rest of the ship uses predominantly widened cylindrical forms I thought the front should echo this and so drew the top sketch. This scribble consolidated the idea particularly as I already had a plastic shape in my stash that would fit the bill.

Below is the result still a work in progress. The idea is that this is a science vessel liberally festooned with a multitude of sensors for planetary survey.

The sides of the command section are made from a plastic (acrylic) cocktail shaker as usual a charity shop find.  It was cut in half and separated by a 2mm styrene structure.

The black curved shape at the very front of the clear cocktail shaker is a knob from a kitchen timer also cut in half.

The cocktail shaker is lightly scribed with lines to aid in aligning panels still to come. 

The new front end is attached to the 2019 mid section which I have started to detail.

The sensors are made from an assortment of kit parts and a number of bits from old transformer toys. The front panel detailing has been completed.

The detailing on the under surface is mostly completed.

There is another sensor mounted underneath.

The mid section features the ubiquitous Panzer hull. The red part is the case from a servo tester which I managed to fry with a faulty servo.

The cockpit well is removable until I complete the wiring for the interior lighting. You can see the PVC tubing which acts as the spine that all the section are mounted on. Each section is removable for ease of working. Eventually I will glue the whole lot together permanently.

I have made a start on the interior but need to get some 1/48 scale pilot figures in order to figure out the rest. The original kit the cockpit is from was 1/35 scale but I am upping the  relative size to 1/48 as I want it to be roomier inside.

 So far I am happy with this the fourth iteration of the command section for this project. It has a certain brutalist esthetic which I quite like. There is a very good chance this is the final version and I will take this model through to completion.

Thanks for looking.

More soon...

Moon Bug Part 7 completed.

 Note: Google informed me today that they deleted my original "Moon Bug part 7 completed" post as it didn't meet their guidelines, something about malware and viruses. I have no idea what they are talking about and there seems to be no way to ask exactly what was the problem. If there was any malware or a virus it certainly wasn't put there by me. I find it really irritating that without any warning they just delete something that I put a lot of effort into and then don't have a mechanism for any helpful discussion. How am I supposed to prevent this happening again if I have no understanding of why it happened in the first place?

So now I have to re-create the post, luckily I also post on the RPF so I have a record of the original text.

Last time the model was at the primer stage, so the first job was to devise a paint scheme. As is my process these days I took a grey primer photo into photoshop and fiddled about until I came up with something I liked. As the vehicle has a whimsical comic book outline I wanted to do a colorful paint job to go with it. This is what I came up with.

I then decided to design up and make some decals to add to the graphic nature of the finish. These I designed in Inkscape which is a free open source vector graphic editing program. I have always liked the graphic elements that Chriss Foss would apply to his gouache painted spacecraft book covers of the 1970s'. Referring to my Chriss Foss art book I availed myself of some of his genius and some of the decals do bear a very strong resemblance to his work. Here is the decal sheet.

One of the problems with DIY decals is that inkjet printers can't print white so if you want white in your decal you have to use white decal paper. That then means the carrier is white and you have to carefully cut around each decal to remove the extraneous white around the edges. Of course you can use clear decal paper which means you don't have to be as precise when cutting out the decal as the borders will be clear and will not be visible once applied but any white areas on your design will come out clear. If it is a big decal you can paint a white area where you want the white bit to be but for small decals I think it would be too hard to get the white painted areas that accurate.

I printed onto white decal paper and once cutting out the decals and applying them with much setting solution found that little white edges showed up which wasn't exactly what I wanted. I have since found some online tips for using white decal paper, where the edges of the decal should be coloured with a permanent marker to get rid of any white bleed once applied. Too late for me but a good idea for any future project that needs custom decals.

Paint was car paint from touch up spray cans with varying shades mixed up once decanted into airbrush jars and airbrushed on. Weathering was my usual method of a wash of Tamiya flat back diluted in much methylated spirits, wiped off with a metho soaked rag in the direction of the required streaks and drybrushing with white students acrylic. I then also added some oil paint colour modulation and a dirty brown pin wash.

One of the things I tried out on this model was painted panels lined out with a fine permanent marker pen. Models from Terrahawks recently came up for auction with accompanying photos and they had a surface that used a similar technique to very good effect.

My conclusion is that I prefer to have panels that are in the very least scribed into the surface if not actually separate from the underlying surface and glued on individually. I prefer the way light hits an actual edge with both a highlight on one side and a shadow on the other.

One thing I added to the model was a couple of dummy whip aerials on the top blisters at the rear. They are made from bicycle gear cable with a couple of plastic kits parts for a mount and a termination at the top. They should wave about fairly realistically when the vehicle is in motion.

Finally here is the finished model.

 

Thanks for looking...

More soon...