A dark basecoat

Decisions

As anyone reading through this silly blog of mine has noticed, painting anything white has not been a recurring theme here. Thinking of it, the only examples I could quickly come up with were the sillily translated Pesterers and a Lanceful of ComGuards 3rd Army BattleMechs.

Always based on what I'd read on the various forums and such I painted my white targets starting from a dark paint and going gradually towards the light. That has served me decently well in the past, so I decided to stay on the course. I didn't feel that black or my beloved black grey would have been needed as the basecoat this time and I chose a shade lighter dark grey (VMA 71123 USAF Dark Grey) to start with.

The distinctive nose

The only area that was going to remain very dark was the cockpit interior, so I started with that. I blasted it very thoroughly from all the angles to get the coverage at maximum. Then I proceeded to paint the upper outside and then leave it to air dry for a while. Later on I returned to complete the lower half.

At this point the nose was finished for the time being, but I wasn't gluing it onto the spaceframe in a good while yet. This way I'd get to paint the insides much more easily, not to mention that painting the next layers on the outside would end up being much easier as well. The protruding cockpit wouldn't also suffer from overspray - nor would it be causing issues with shadowing other parts either. This was my assumption at least.

Spaceframe, the

The Ondiv required quite a bit of spinning around, rotation and its own very peculiar painting plan. I had to start with the spaceframe, the main wing and the flight mode - time outward facing wing surfaces first so I'd avoid making extra messes anywhere and doing unnecessary masking.

Wow. The pic above ended up being a bit strange... While airbrushing around I noticed a new problem had raised its ugly head: my paint was too thick or it just dried a bit too quickly inside the airbrush. One of the best advantages of the airbrush was that it allowed quick, even and light coating of large surfaces when all the settings were at their widest - while allowing for precise and small cone of spraying with tighter settings in skilled hands. Now the flow ended up being quickly at a pencil's width and a very basic overspraying turned into a constantly more annoying and physically bothersome colouring in.

That did not end up being a massive issue. For my last session I mixed in some thinner and got the final wing surfaces done while only going halfway mad. A very concious decision was made when I left the bottom of the shuttle untouched, to wait for the duration of a few project steps.