DropShip detailing

Getting to the tiny bits

Painting with a figurative massive brush was done now so it was the time to switch to smaller ones. Nice!

A series of tubes

Each of these struts had three massive hoses going into the hydraulic bits. Painting all in the same way would've been so very boring. It would've also been so very boring to paint them all in the same sequence. To add a tiny bit of variety into all this I chose a few colours (VMA 71315 Tire Black, VMA 71028 Sand Yellow, VMA 71003 Red RLM23, VMC 70942 Light Green, VMA 71111 UK Mediterranean Blue) and spread them onto different pipes as my sick mind desired.

Tire blacks

Sand yellows

RLM23 reds

Light greens

UK Mediterranean blues

Washing would bring out some surface texture later on. The rubbery ones stood out the worst, and I was pondering if I ought to repaint them some other way as I already had a healthy amount of greys all around.

Door edges and engine nozzles

Because I forgot to fix the edges of the landing strut armour panels in grey, I did that at this point. I remembered to fix the lower ones as well, even if they were easy to forget behind all the other stuff. I thought that the touching edges - the dark grey inner parts - not the freshly painted outer parts, could benefit from some caution stripes. Painting those at these angles was going to be fun to say the least but they'd bring more life to the greyness.

On the fusion engine nozzles I followed the same approach that I found useful in the earlier Starscream F-15: sandy tan. Maybe I could drybrush it a bit after the upcoming dark wash.

Jade bits

Being a Gamma Galaxy ride it of course had to have jade highlights (VGC 72026 Jade Green). The turret armours were to me a clear place, and another simple choice was the bits in the crown. Maybe there could be something else still, I just couldn't immediately point out what that would or could be.

While waiting on inspiration to strike I painted the caution striping onto each of the twelve doors. Thanks to the unpainted metal they already had the dark grey base, so I just added the yellow ochre bits over that. On the bottom end of the upper doors they were quite easy to paint and one could actually see them. To compensate the upper edge of the lower doors, that was going to come into contact with the counterpart just painted and the main reason to add hazard markings in the first place, was in a more difficult place and angle, so I just added a couple of bars per piece.

Edge highlighting 

It wasn't the time for chipping so I built a bit on the earlier drybrushings with a light grey by just making them stronger and clearer using a thin paintbrush edge. Most of these were done on the upper ends of the landing strut doos and the upper edges of the bigger chunks on the upper hull.

At this point I figured out that one of the engine nozzles was painted differently from the three later ones. I fixed that by painting the first one to follow suit of the others that only had the outer ring in dark grey. The difference was simply caused by me A/B testing which looked nicer and I had not taken the time to complete the setup.