nude side
nude top
port bow
starboard aft
starboard low
starboard aft low
port high
port
decal
I love kitbashing - Slamming a bunch of parts together, slapping-on some paint, DONE. That definition fits the original Galactica Rag Tag Fleet, but for me, "slamming" takes a couple of weeks. But a ship built that way usually has a great deal of character, like the K'Siegii a couple of years ago and all but one of last year's Awtoe's.
Having ton's of spare parts tends to lock-up my creativity, causing me to sit and stare, slack-jawed, so I adopt a constraint. This time it was, use anything from my drawer of mech parts. Fortunately, there was an Apache helicopter in there, too. And I wanted some external stores - Missles and missile packs.
As usual, I just grabbed some parts and held them together to see if they "fit". Sure enough, I found a mech *mumble* part that fit where the chopper's canopy had gone. And some mech feet fit amongst the raised panels on the fuselage. A mech leg fit the end of the boom, and a mech torso fit atop it. All that went fast - Just an hour or so - Leaving me a ship that looked a little like a shark or maybe a Wong Dragon. The inspired part being done, the rest was the old routine of fill-in the gaps.
Painting... Ok. There's an HGTV show called Curb Appeal, where a designer and crew help a homeowner dress-up the front of their house and yard. The designer suggests the colors for different parts of the house, but the homeowner chooses the exact ones by painting swatches on, say, the front door. With a swath of each color side-by-side, it's easy to tell the difference. But when one is finally chosen and painted on the house the difference is so subtle that no one can tell which color was chosen. So, I'm going to say that I used unusually (for me) dark but authentic military colors in order to heighten the helicopter look, and let it go at that.
I had fun doing the camouflage on last year's Patrol Boat, but before I could do another weird one I was inspired by tonyG2's rendition of an Osprey. I love the decorations Alfred puts on his ships, so I pawed through my box of decals until I found some rub-on sheets made for Pinewood Derby cars, thus the name Dragonfire . More decals completed the helicopter riff. May have ruined the effect with heavy-handed dry-brushing, but I'm happy with the overall look.
