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.

A cockpit update

Going my own way

This project pretty much begun with me searching for reference pics of the cockpit. Comparing to the Lambda-class shuttle cockpits in the movie this model has surprisingly few details in common, and I certainly wasn't going to go down the road of insane detailing. So I pulled a decision from my sleeve to use few colours for the buttons and displays (black, white, red, metal) even if a couple more would've been at home there (that meant I skipped a terminal-green and blue).

The basic bits

I started my detailing process by applying dark grey (still the same VMA 71123 USAF Dark Grey) to some of the surfaces that had gotten a bit too much overspray during the airbrushing sessions, such as the console panels. On the plain surfaces the very gentle hint of grey/white was just fine, as the overall look remained dark. While I was at it I also painted the frame edges where the viewport glass was going to be glued, as if it worked for airplanes, it was surely work here as well.

To give this cockpit a bit more worn-in look I drybrushed some surfaces with Steel (VMA 71065), which I also used for some randomish bits on the outside of the cockpit and the hull itself. The most noticeable marks of wear and tear I made on the door panels and the ramp in front of it. Finally I did a very gentle drybrushing of Steel on all the buttons, switches and displays.

Detailing

Both on the left and rights sides of the door was a set of lamps. In the Return of the Jedi they were a bit like blue WLAN signal strength markings. This model, on the other hand, had three light panels that I decided to drybrush with pure white (VMA 71001). My idea was that it'd look pretty nicely, but it wouldn't still be an attention-stealer.

Then I kept on applying white drybrushing over the buttons, because in my world just about all of them were going to be like that. For a short moment I was thinking if the light panels should later be treated with a satin or gloss varnish, but most likely they'd look more wet than shiny.

Now it was the turn of the displays and the things that looked like good old-fashioned dials on the dashboard to get black (VGC 72051). I decided that the plain black was going to be only a very limited thing and in very tightly contained number of things in the cockpit itself.

Next I returned with the white paint to add detailing to the displays I had just given a black backdrop. Both the pilot and the copilot (I was assuming) had somethingthat looked like a <= 14" CRT display in front of them. The leftmost one got a series of dotty rows to represent lines of text as an idea of a text-based status information or a system log, whatever they were reading from their MFD. To the rightmost one I tried to paint some kind of a X/Y axis for coordinates, for example.

Finally I took a bit of red (VMA 71085 Ferrari Red) and touched up a few buttons and button-like protrusions. Some of them were lonely and some were in small groups. What were they all about? I hadn't got a clue, some may have been "don't touch this self destruction thing accidentally!" kind of warning colours, some "this is important, so it's clearly highlighted" and so on. As I had thought before, maybe some keys could've been painted green and blue, without looking out of place, but at this stage I didn't feel the need for it.

Reinstalling the seats

As soon as these things were done for the cockpit, I glued the seats back in. Back in the day I had painted them, maybe according to the instructions, maybe because I just felt like it, with plain brown on the cushionage and lightish grey on the edges and backs. The contrast was strong and it looked kinda silly to me.

Now I repainted them with the dark grey (VMA 71123). Thanks to the overspraying effect I mentioned above, they were now clearly darker than the floor but not outrageously so. The seating part (the cushionlike part) I now painted flat black (VGC 72051). In my mind they now looked like a believable "metal frame with some sort of a disgustingly uncomfy vinyl-like padding" scenario.

The white bits, part 2

Finishing the wings

This was a pretty straightforward step in my project, plodding on the same tracks as the last time. Now I mixed my paint much more angrily, so the annoying half-dry paint spatters didn't cause issues

I begun by painting the bits I held onto before and proceeded to touch up the greebled trenches in the wings, just to be sure. Some of those needed another run, anyway.

Then I rotated the wings up and in a neverending circular motion airbrushed them with off-white. To finish up the session I attacked a few sections again, such as the shoulder-mounted double blasters' curved shield plates and the front edges of the hull armour (the front-facing surfaces I just covered with a post-it note to keep them not turning white by accident).

A generic look-around

Just to show how the whole thing had changed I took photos from the back and the front, also to show the greeblies. Of course they'd be much more impressive if the photos weren't scaled down so far, but I wasn't going to upload massive pics just to show a #wip feature.

I was surprisingly happy with the effect at this point. Of course there were some things that I was going to end up fixing still, but that's how it's always been and will remain so.

White overspray

Off-white

I had finally reached the stage of this renovation project where the look of the vehicle was going to change visibly from the previous iteration. Last night I remembered that I had bought ages ago some off-white for national insignia painting (mostly for Balkenkreuzen, and I still hadn't gotten to try out the sets of stencils I bought many years ago now!) and such. I thought that maybe I'd try it out and in the end, if I felt like it, blast a tiny bit of plain white from above, very gently. Maybe it couldn't even be noticed at all, maybe it'd add a bit to the result, but we'd find out in good time.

This was in line with the "shade by shade towards the final colour" method. The first and potentially only white was Insignia White (VMA 71279), that got its first appearance in the 'Mumblings now, and not on a German blocky cross, as I had stupidly assumed.

The cockpit submodule

Regarding the cockpit I decided that of this bit only the swanhead-like part was going to end up white. The neck - or the part that joined it to the hull (whatever this airlock / corridor was called in the specs) was going to remain grey. Maybe the look I was going for would work in real life, at least as an idea it sounded good, because the iconic features would be highlighted natually and the visual support surfaces and areas would also bring some depth to the entirety. Besides, if it was all the same colour, the shuttle would end up looking much more boring.

The spaceframe and wings

This time I started with the hull itself. The edges I painted by blasting from the center towards the outer edges, to protect the front and back ends from silly and unnecessary overspraying.

Next I pointed my attention and my Badger towards the wings, starting from the freshly-greebled areas with a gentle touch. I didn't want to drown the greebled trenches with paint, ruining the depth effect, I did as gentle a touchup I managed.

The wings themselves were pretty straightforward. Again I had either mixed my paint badly or it was a tiny bit drier than necessary, as the airbrush spat some flakes pretty much constantly. Perhaps a part of the reason was the high temperature at that moment, but these excuses didn't really help much with my irritation.

Again I left a small patch uncovered on the top wing for my own safety. Just like I said the last time, a 100% flat factory-like application of paint was not my goal (splotchless, yes, but...) and the fluffy cloud effect gave it a more used look.

Continuation ponderings

On the next session I'd cover up the handhold area and I'd wrap up the other surfaces of the rotating wings. After that I was going to be thinking with my head glowing red in which order I'd approach what detail and subtask.

The current plan was that I'd mask off certain rectangles for various greys. Maybe all of them weren't going to be dark grey, the middle grey could work on most, then I could use a different light grey on symmetrically located bits just for variety. Maybe I'd do that to one per wing surface, but at this point I knew I'd pretty much make up my mind on the spot, when I got that far and the compressor was already purring.

Some sort of an application of a light wash was looming in the horizon one. I was also thinking that I could apply some rain streaks on the shuttle sitting somewhere in its landing configuration. The engine exhaust ports were their own still shrouded mystery, as I don't think I was going to leave them as they used to be, glowing white.

Dry-fitting to check the effect

Now I wanted to check how my chosen look worked, because it was still decently easy to change direction. I felt it looked nice in white and the dark, totally untouched cockpit looked great already. The contrast was good and I couldn't really but wonder why in the Empire was I so fixated to flat grey over a decade ago.

Rainy grey but in space

A brief return to the previous look

What else is the 'Mumblings but doing the same thing all over again endlessly? Now I made the Imperial Shuttle via a layer of white primer to a dark grey basecoat and then to just about the same shade of grey it had worn for over a decade. Just by my visual comparison this grey (VMA 71120 USAF Medium Grey) was pretty close if not exactly the same as the old Revell enamel paint. This was not planned, nor was it important, as it was just a step between dark and light. I just found it somehow amusing.

The nose part

This phase got started from the most critical part, the nose. I protected the insides with a post-it piece and thus minimized the repainting needed on the inside. It had to be said, it did look pretty nice this way already, but somehow I managed to keep my natural laziness leashed - at this stage at least.

The main body

Painting the hull and wings went amazingly quickly, with this paint being fresher / runnier. The first round was actually very enjoyable, especially when compared to the last three evenings of slow grinding.

I begun with the insides of the folding wings, then proceeded to the hull and as I still had time on my hands, I got to the top wing as well. The last two of this photoset showed how I left the rear end of the stationary wing unpainted to give myself a handhold for twisting, turning and rotating the model. I made a concious choice to let the paintjob look a bit "cloudlike" instead of aiming for a 100% flatness, but I also didn't go for a strong preshading effect anywhere.

No, I had not forgotten that the wings had those more or less rectangular shapes that needed to be darker. I had planned on doing those after taking care of the white layer, making the masking much simpler.

The real world threw some extras on my way for about a week, before I got to proceed with this greyness-increasing process. At this point the underbelly of the Ondiv was waiting for the project to get to the stage where the rotating wings could be glued permanently to the landing config.

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.