Prometheus from Fantastic Plastic............. Resin Kit build

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HI there, I received this from fantastic plastic a couple of months ago. 20151219_163745.jpg I've spent a few hours on it so far. The main body comes in about 6 large resin parts. The casting is pretty good, no bubbles on the surface, not a lot of warping and zero warming of parts needed to make them fit well enough to use. the engine arms are a single piece with the engine mounting holes on each end. The engines as they are in the picture are made from a number of parts which needed some careful sanding and a lot of trial fitting to make right. At the moment it is just trial fitted together to get an overall picture in my mind. The paint job is a bit of a new direction for me. The detailing on the surfaces of the model are non existent, and if you've seen the movie you'll know the surface on the Prometheus is covered in millions of small panels. I'm not going to try to copy them all as it would lead to a breakdown of some kind, either in my head or with my relationship with the wife, but I am going to try to get as many of them on there as I can. So, to this end its been shot with satin black automotive paint as a base. Everything else will be done in tamia paints. I will airbrush as much detail as I possible can, then scribe through the layers of tamia colour back to the basecoat to hopefully reveal ultra thin panel lines.
 
The lading gear/ engine flaps are all in separate castings with a LOT of flashing to remove. If you don't like spending hours cleaning up very tiny pieces of resin then this kit probably isn't for you. But I must say that there were no parts with material missing from the desired shape. The lading gear isn't in this picture, I will post some showing the parts soon.
 
20151219_163630.jpg There are a couple of seams left to finish off which have been revealed nicely by the flat colour and a few little surface imperfections to remove, but other than that I would recommend this to any decent modeller who's into the movie. The Fantastic Plastic guys have done a sterling job with this kit. Size wise it is about 15 inches long and 10 inches wide so not a bad sized lump, should show well on a nice stand. I'm off to trawl the threads for panel scratching now. update again soon.
 
Here's a shot of the unused landing gear parts. These are for the landing gear down version. This shows the amount of cleaning up needed to bring these up to scratch.
20151223_075016.jpg
 
This is a shot of the parts for the In flight version which I will be building. It took a fair while to get these cleaned up to this stage, with a lot of careful scalpel work.
20151223_075417.jpg
 
20160110_183750.jpgI got a chance to do a little more work on the model the other day, so I hit the painting with some yellow stripes and white tubes. I thought I needed some more surface detail and a method of keeping the score lines in order when I get to doing them. so I carefully positioned plasterers edge tape on the surface, which is fantastic for dividing surfaces in a regular way. Its main advantage is the slight stickiness of the tape which allows you to actually stick it to the surface and paint through with small hand held masks. It looks like a bad day in chequer town at the moment, but most of this white panel detail will disappear once the other panels are masked and added in the white grey colour. Hopefully it will give the ship a very subtle smattering of separate panels as it slowly turns whiter with each pass. this is the belly of the dead turtle !
 
20160110_183223.jpghere's a side view of the model with its tartan misting !. I made the base colour in auto paint in order that I can scratch through the Tamia colour easily with a craft knife later on in the build. unfortunately one drawback is that it is easy to scratch before I have applied the seal to the surface, so I am having to be very careful with my masking. I am using 1mm wide tape for most of the lines as it gives great flexibility on the compound surfaces, unfortunately it sometimes grabs hard and removes a 1mm wide section of the grey. At first I was a bit pissed at this, but now I think I may try to use this to my advantage for some super detailed weathering. Fingers crossed.
 
20160110_180631.jpgtop view so far, very rough at this stage, more of a surface sketch than a finished look. The chequers will make the panel scribing a lot easier to keep regular,, with luck.
20160110_180641.jpgThe side views are coming together now.
20160110_180706.jpgcockpit revealed, I scratch built the folding panels around the cockpit, as the ones moulded into the body were a little to thin and warped badly making them look more like curtains than shields, so they were removed and replaced.
20160110_183125.jpgI also tried a preliminary scratch or two on the nosecone. Bear in mind that these lines are done with the very tip of a very sharp scalpel with no pressure applied, only the weight of the blade to cut through, they are ridiculously thin. The lines only go through the black paint layer revealing the grey primer, and are not removing any material from the casting. Good job really as I think I'm going to redo these with some custom made plastic formers to work to. Ill see next time I'm in the garage.
Ok that's it for this update, keep the faith, nannu long and prosper.
 
Looking forward to this! I had my eye on this for a while..but it seems that it's missing a lot of detail from the on screen ship. But still can't wait for you to finish this!
 
Today I managed to skip any garden work because of the freezing conditions, which is great as I've had another few hours on the model.
I've started to shade the panels in using the grid as a reference and the change has worked better than I thought it would. You can see in the first shot the first three rows back on the side pods have been done, and some other bits. but you can easily spot the areas which are regular from the grid. I will do the complete body in this way as it is the only way to generate some scale to this 1/500 scale kit. normally I don't do this scale because of this reason, but i'm quite enjoying seeing it come together, albeit very slowly. The black areas on the model will be done in the same way in a few differing greys. anyhow that's my day done. for some reason I cant attach an image to this so they will follow.
 
Thanks sergiotron. Hopefully I can survive long enough to finish it off. I agree, its one of the best ships in recent times. But I still prefer the landing sequence of he Nostromo over the Prometheus. hence why I've done this one in flight mode a I think it looks so much better with the engines facing rearwards and the extra dimension of the angles. It always reminds me of Thunderbird 2 when it is in landed mode.
 
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