#model detailing

Showing stuff like people riding around in trams, stock footage from disaster movies of stuff like oil refineries exploding when they took a hit, abandoned parts of the ship that you need climbing gear to reach.

Like, objectively the reboot had establishing shots that showed its scale, like Colonial One berthing inside her hangar, but the original series did a better job maintaining that vibe, showing that part of day-to-day life is dealing with how stupid-huge the ship is.

A lot of the time in the reboot it felt like it could have been set on something the size of a WWII aircraft carrier instead of a mile-long city ship.

Even externally, the original looks bigger because it’s more greebly, there’s more terrain for the eye to latch on to and go “holy cow look at all that stuff!” as she slides by.

Same problem the Enterprise-D had, and how the USS Zumwalt isn’t obvious about the fact that it’s bigger than a Dreadnought-class battleship.

Granted, the JJ Abrams Star Trek movies and subsequent series like Discovery and Strange New Worlds waaay went too far in the opposite direction, the internal environments are so spacious you could forget it’s supposed to be set on an enclosed spaceship at all.

Now I am moving things back into my studio I can start working on all those projects that stalled during the home renovations again. Whilst I still haven't actually bought my new work benches / desks yet I have moved my old bench back in the mean time so I have somewhere to work at.

One of the long stalled projects is the BAe Hawk 100 I started working on almost exactly a year ago now. I didn't really get that much done before work started at home so I was glad to see this one return to the bench as it is a kit I was really looking forward to building.

Well the box was promptly deposited on the bench and I started pulling parts and sprues out and examining them when I came across the parts for the NeOmega Resin cockpit I had begun dry fitting the last time the kit was on the bench. I eagerly whipped out the detail brushes and some paints and set to work on the bang seats first of all.

My Google skills must have suffered during my time away, given the popularity of this aircraft across the world for some reason I was actually struggling to find reference photos to work from to begin with, so I started using some of the kits standard colour call outs mixed in with some, as I later found out, not so accurate guess work.

Regardless I ploughed on occasionally heading back to Google and occasionally finding something like a half decent reference photo. This means that there is some correction work to do with regards to the colours used but, for the most part it was nice just to be able to get some paint down and detail picked out.

The Instrumentation panels were next and to be honest I did struggle a little with this. I know its just a matter of being out of practice though so I wasn't too disheartened at my initial attempts. I may well go back and re-paint them though. Dry brushing and picking out detail I find is something I need to do regular to be able to achieve the result I want so I don't mind the prospect of it taking me a couple of attempts to get it looking the way I would like.

Moving on from the instrument panels I decided to have a look at the tub and control sticks, again I found myself not entirely enamoured with my results but I was starting to find things a little more familiar by this time and I think I made a better job of this than the panels.

It all still needs tidying up, some parts still need repainted and then I can get a nice wash down to try and tone down some of the colours and give the base grey more of a used look and tie it all together which will no doubt help a fair bit.

None the less I decided to throw it all together in another dry fit just to see how everything looked with this initial attempt at paint and see how much of the errors in my first attempt at painting could actually be seen.

Well, as is usual when your not looking at things in isolation, it started to look better and other than some tidying up and the colour corrections I think I may get away without having to repaint everything if I want to.

Regardless of end result it was good to get my hand back in and I was also quite pleased that I hadn't become disheartened after assessing the initial attempt. It's important to remember when detail painting like this that it is just paint and paint can easily be stripped for another attempt or even just painted over.

Anyway I will leave you with one final photo of the parts dry fitted you will see in this one there is a join seam on the rear cowling that will need a little work once everything is glued in place, I am off to practice my Google as well as my detail painting some more.

So Much For Keeping It Simple