Well, let's wrap this thing up....
So base coat on, it was time for a gloss coat and then DECALS...
Oh, those decals. Those damn 9000 year old decals. I might have nightmares for awhile...
The emblems on the sides went on with no problems, but those "rainbow" stripes... well, they basically tried to disintegrate on me. And both in exactly the same place. The "yellow" ends were fine, but as each got toward the "pink" ends, that's where the problems cropped up. Although difficult to really see in the photo below, the inner "pink" ends wound up so rough that I resigned myself to some necessary additional weathering over top of those ends to hide how bad they are.
And now, decals out of the way, it was time to dirty things thing up.
I started out with a sludge wash of a mix of black and brown (yep, had that same idea, Riceball). I was pretty heavy-handed with it, knowing I was going to remove most of it later anyway. Here it is most of the way toward being "cleaned" up...
So the next thing I had to decide was exactly how much to weather this thing...
While a debate of exactly what color the base model really was could probably go on and on, one things that seems pretty clear is that the actual weathering didn't appear to include a lot of "damage." That is to say, paint chipping. It seems as though most of it was airbrushed/drybrushed/pastel (not sure which, maybe a little of all?) streaking and smudging.
But... the thing is, I like chipping up a model like this. Also, as probably everyone here knows, this design was an original concept for the Colonial Viper from Battlestar Galactica, a show for which the finish on the models was heavily inspired by Star Wars... So why not make the weathering on this a bit of an homage to the ship's origins?
Besides, I feel like battle and environment damage help to tell a story.
So I added some paint chipping around the model. I also used some very fine grit sandpaper and sanded over the decals to make them a little faded and weathered. Most of the rest of the weathering was done with pastel chalk.
So here we are, about 90% done...
Following the above image, I added a bit more here and there, toned down a bit here and there, and finally got to an end point I'm mostly satisfied with. More on that in a minute, but first, some beauty shots of the "finished" model...
All in all, I'm pretty happy with how this turned out. To be honest, this kit intimidated me. I can't tell you the number of times I took it off the shelf, looked at it, then sighed and put it back on the shelf -- rinse and repeat. The biggest sticking point for me was just how poorly the two body halves fit together. I anticipated a nightmare of things not lining up properly. Turns out that once I used clamps to force things to go where they needed to go, the fit wasn't terrible other than some gap filling.
How accurate is this kit? I am not the person to ask... but all assembled and painted, I think it looks pretty good.
Now about that "finished" thing. So I'm not sure why, but when I applied the finishing dull coat to protect the model, it all but eliminated most of the dusty appearance I had put on the engines to better match the photos I've seen of the actual model.
We'll see if it winds up bugging me enough to fix it..
