Shuttle washing

Highlighting

Those bits that I had not touched up with white I worked on with a grey wash (Vallejo Model Wash for dark & grey vehicles (76516 Grey)). Perhaps that could've been applied on the off-white bits too, but I'd test that out on the underbelly first, because if that wash ruined the white it'd still be easily fixable - or kept on on the potentially superdirty underside of the shuttle.

I began with the most unnoticeable part, the front bottom section of the cockpit module. Then I went through the whole module pretty rapidly, concentrating on the funkiest surfaces and details. Some kind of a brighter spot of colour (red, green, blue on a cable, a button) might improve the area by breaking up the slightly monotone grey world. Perhaps, perhaps.

The front-facing hull parts of the shuttle were going to be mostly overshadowed by the cockpit module, but I knew that the washing would still improve it greatly. Maybe I could've even used brown or even black wash on some areas, but I felt that the grey wash worked just fine.

I had not touched the inside of the shuttle after all, as I was going to glue the ramp in the closed position when I got that far in the reinstallation. The ramp just didn't look good enough to be kept open anymore.

On the rear side the general look with the twin laser cannon was a bit better after a wash, but I couldn't help thinking that maybe the cable-like things might work better in black. Just like on the underside of the cockpit module, a few monotony-breaking details could bring a great deal of improvement with little effort. Those laser gun barrels I'd most likely paint black, because gunmetal (not to mention brighter steel or even chrome) would not quite sit well there, in my imagination.

To summarize: within a few process steps I might add a couple of silly spots of colour to break the grey overall look. The wings were ok so I wasn't going to do anything to them, unless something required a new quick blast of off-white. This'd get done at the same time with the engine cowling, that, as the photo showed, was still grey and unfinished.

A storm of nines

def get_blog_age(self):
    age = 9 # ref. Rise of Skywalker
    return age

Right. Nine full years done. This last year has been a slow one, kinda like the previous one was, if you were looking at it from the scale modeling perspective. Other, more pressing things have eaten much more time and those have not fit the theme requirements of this silly blog.

Pygame

I'm somewhat ashamed of admitting this publicly, but the python bit up there was my first (and ridiculous) three rows of code since April 2018! Maybe at some point I should get up to speed and install python 3, a new pygame and their friends on my 'puter to rejoin my goalless game project. Most likely I'd push the existing codebase to /dev/null and begin with something new, because just looking at the post history the last time I wrote about it was five years ago (part IX, what a coincidence!).

Gaming

Yes, I admit, I've been pretty lazy over the last couple of years and easily jumped on reducing my incredibly Steam backlog. In a sense it's been good that the Project Assistant I has enjoyed Minecraft more and more, as that has caused some competition over keyboard time on my machine and I've then had less convenient excuses for slacking off with modelings.

In the 'Mumblings I've only mumbled about Battletech and Stellaris (spoiler warning: that one's still waiting for its turn after SHU Ondiv's cycle) because I have somehow thought that no one would be too interested in my comments about Stacking, Costume Quest, Brütal Legend, Bridge Constructor Portal, Deadbolt, Broken Age, Mudrunner or the old Shadow Warrior, nor that I had anything interesting to say about them. Perhaps I'd jump next on to Production Line, it might prove cool with its Factorio influences. Could be cool, could be boring for you, I'll make up my mind much, much later.

Scale models

During the last 365 days I have started a decent-ish amount (6) of models, of which four were made by Metal Earth Models. There's been a YT-1300 LF, Slave I, Tiger I, Soundwave and Ju-87, with the still-ongoing restoration of the Lambda-class Shuttle. The last two were the only ones have been tagged for this year, the last four were all of last year's cases (my working and reporting schedules have been gently offset lately: the IX/2017 wrapping up came out almost exactly a year ago) were built in the last months of 2018, the final one's reportage ended up early 2019. If you thought about it, a project per two months wasn't too bad, but as the MEM sets have always lasted a few silly evenings a piece, the time has disappeared somewhere.

This year looked like, should I say, embarrassing this way. Maybe I could finish up three projects. And what would I go for after the shuttle? The Königstiger w/ interior has been waiting for three years now, easily, should that get bumped to the top of the pile? That one wouldn't end up being done in this time, though...

Numbers through the history

for number in numbers:
    crunch(number)

All in all, at the time of writing this post I had typoed up 486 posts, of which 2 were still in the draft phase and 3 were scheduled, 4 were waiting for their translations for various reasons. In the last month the blog had been read 116 times and during all these years a grand total of 41104 viewings (wtff). All that has never ceased to amaze me because I've been writing this to amuse myself and I haven't advertised this anywhere. Insane stuff.

Unique highlights

Pondering by my paint collection

I was perusing my paint collection and the first paint I picked was perhaps my least favourite of the light greys I owned (VMA 71121 USAF Light Grey), because I thought it'd be a nicely subtle one for this model in few select places. As the second one I opted for RLM light blue (VMA 71101 Hellblau RLM 78) and decided that two were just enough.

The chaoticness of the end result could've been increased by painting different masked-off boxes with different paints, to companse the symmetrical layout of the highlightable panels. I decided to paint them all symmetrically, anyway, and I didn't feel that this was going to make it boring. I was just somehow reminding myself how many approaches I could've taken here.

Filling the trapezoids

I started my painting process by airbrushing the light grey to the front boxes of the fixed wing and the long rectangles in the rear part of the bottom halves of the folding wings. Those just felt like the best candidates in my mind's eye for this shade that, as I said before, was not among my favourites.

All the remaining areas I painted with Luftwaffe's light blue that worked very nicely in this white-grey ship, in my opinion. The thought of adding a tiny amount of grey violet (RLM 75) did pop in my mind at some point, but I stuck to my original decision of using few colours.

Masklessness

The midpoint result after removing the masking tapes looked pretty neat. Maybe I'd still have to touch up on the fixed wing's left rear side with some insignia white, but otherwise I was more than content. Later on I'd wash the front and back areas of grey in the hull, but the white areas I most likely was going to leave as-is. I was somewhat afraid of even a light wash being too strong here.

Masking some wing panels

Masking tape, yay!

As like almost everything else, one could paint and style the Lambda-class shuttles whichever way one wanted to. Just like the great Bob Ross said: "You can do anything you like, it's your world". I decided to be halfway boring and instead of strong personalization I'd do a couple of panels in grey - of two different shades, even!

I started by choosing the second to last right trapezoid -shaped block from the ends of the folding wings, on the sides that were going to end up facing inside. Both were masked the same way, but I could've of course done the inner shape on the other one only, for variety.

On the fixed wing the three boxes on the rear end caught my eyes, perhaps they were a bit too obvious, even. Still, I chose the lot of them again.

My process

Before we get to the photos I thought I'd mention why I was wasting your time and my drive space with masking process pics. According to my own hazy memory I hadn't documented my working steps decently or properly in ages, no matter which part of the process was in question, I'd just gone with a light "this is where it was and this is what it ended up" set of photos and explanations.

Not that I had any delusions of thinking that someone was reading my Project Mumblings to learn something new or to compare approaches in applying masking tape :D This was again something to satisfy my need to add some variety to these posts and here we got, me telling and showing what I did and how, for a change

Right. Because all the outer edges in this group were such that I could just pull four lenghts of tape to cover all of it, I started with the two tiny bits in between them. I was going to paint the insides and the bumps, so everything around them was to be protected. For that I applied two bits of tape tightly on the surface I wanted to protect and pressed the tape very snugly along the outer edges of the panel lines.

Next I made incisions along the panel lines with my xacto knife. The obvious benefit of a sharp blade was that I could cut the tape easily without having to resort to using force and then also scouring the plastic itself.

With some gentle poking with the tip of the blade the excess tape came off nicely. At this point everything looked to be in order.

All of this was done on both sides of the wing in a couple of silly minutes. The biggest hindrance was the shuttle itself, as I had to balance it on the table and between the table and my leg, to support it and to keep the wings from being bent.

To avoid excess boringness I wanted something else on the fixed wing than just the three boxes I already half-complained being obvious. I chose a small trapezoid from the leading edge and taped around it. As said, I did all this identically on both sides, even though nothing really forced me to do things that way.

The last panels

Now I was left with the bottom surfaces of the rotating wings, that were soon going to be the outer sides. Maybe boringly I did those identical as well and masked off a right angle trapezoid from the tip of the wing.

As my last highlightable panel a long rectangle that ran lengthwise along the rear edge from the bend towards the tip was chosen. That just felt like a nice part to bump up a notch.

Mere seconds before turning the compressor on

As this subheading said, just before I started painting I utilized a ridiculous amount of post-it notes to protect my model from overspraying. This was to be done because some of the tape masks were a bit narrower than my paranoia with my airbrushing allowed.

Bright white highlight

I had been going back and forth inside my mind, if I should or should not use a tiny bit of bright white as a highlight for the shuttle. There were two concerns that I had: either the effect was way too strong and it'd ruin the whole off-white idea, or that it was completely unnoticeable. The thing going for it was that if it worked, it'd be a subtle but neat little thing.

In the end I decided to give it a shot, as ruining the whole model was pretty unlikely and if my concern #2 was going to be the way things went, I would've only wasted a bit of masking tape, time and a few drops of paint.

Protective masking

Only the recently painted cockpit interior needed any special protection, as everything else was already white on some level. I applied masking tape very strictly along the outer edges of the canopy edges and the empty space I was going to cover with a piece of kitchen paper. The point of the lump of paper was just to protect from the paint spraying from the zenith, the sides weren't an issue because I wasn't going to be pointing from those angles anyway.

Highlighting

First I blasted some pure white (VMA 71001 White) on the cockpit part and from there I proceeded to spray the wings and the spaceframe. I held on to the hull from the bottom so that I also kept the wings as tightly shut in the landing mode as I could. I did most of my airbrushing from a "straight above" angle, but for the wing tips I did some variation, just to help those a bit. The distance was always kept as what I'd call respectable, 'cause I didn't want a strong effect, just a gentle highlight.

In the photo below the bits were drying (that thin a layer was most likely already dry, but I wanted to be safe). If nothing else, it clearly wasn't an overstrong effect, so all was good so far.