Corvette FP680

This guy started in back on the bottom with my favourite part, a white cone I get from Sweet10 bottles. The engines are plexiglass cylinders. The sloped engine-ends are sample cups I got in one of the room parties at the 1997 Lone Star Con in Austin. The host there was serving home-made liqueur in those cups. They were plastic, so I kept them, and told him I'd immortalize them. He probably thought I was drunk at the time and would quite forget. Well, I wasn't, and I didn't. Oh, and the dome atop the engines was from an ancient Revell spindle-shaped spaceship. The nose is almost identical to FG829's to make them appear part of the same fleet. As if the paint job wouldn't.

My usual style of painting is to coat the whole thing regulation spaceship lightgray, then airbrush the open expanses with white to give the texture a bit of depth. I decided to do something a little more complicated this time. The basecoat of Krylon Sandlable Primer was followed by Testor's lightgray, then, in select places, Insignia Red. The lightgray, here, helped keep the red... Well, red, instead of dark red. The red was masked-off in chunks and stripes, then the ship got a coat of the Testor's paint that's a pretty close match to the Krylon. It was masked-off in chunks before the rest of the ship was painted lightgray again. When all the paint was dry, all the masks were removed to reveal... A lot of raised edges of paint where the edges of the masks had been. Bummer. Much scraping and sanding (and repainting) later, it was time for the decals.

The decals were special. (So special that if anyone has some out there, send'em to me. Hey - I'll name a ship after you!) The decals were the freebies given-away at the 1997 IPMS Nationals in Columbus. What makes them so neat is that they feature the markings one pilot had on a couple of WWII fighters - Each done in three different scales! Thus I was blessed with the same lettering in three different sizes. Decal nirvana. FG829 got one set, and FP680 got another. This marks the first time in a long while I've used english markings. And the first time I've used so many. It was kinda fun, though it would have worked out a tad better if I'd decided upfront where they were all going, so I could have left a uniform space around them. Live and learn.

Jack Wendt took some pictures of the entries in the 2000 IPMS Nationals. One of his shots was of mine.