Liliaceace Tigrinum
Pronounced "Tiger Lily", this ship started as a way to dispatch two mecha legs and a chest, and make a ship shaped like something on Andromeda. Each wing and the back half started as plasticard. Added the mecha parts and puzzled, "Hmm... How do I put a cockpit in that mess?" I went with quarter-inch black plexiglas, cut it to shape, polished the nose, then masked-off the cockpit windows, and got back to the fun part.
Had I not decided to add more fins and left it with just the big wings I might have avoided... Concept Confusion. But no, I just went adding fins all over, echoing the shape of the wings. It wasn't till I was all done with everything but the guns that I did the usual, "Hold it up to the light, squint, and see if it looks like a decent ship," when I saw, not a proud, exagerrated chest and arms bully-boy heavy fighter, but a...
Flattened frog.
Some ships can get away with big arms - Take the Gagnon, for instance. Maybe if I hadn't added the last angle to the end of the main wings? Sure, it might have looked like a Romulan Scout, but at least we know which direction that ships flies! *Sigh* Playing catch-up, now, I added long guns in an attempt to make the big end look more like the front. Probably should have added bell-shaped rocket motors to the backend, too, but it wouldn't have fit-in, style-wise.
The paint was inspired by a rather large ditch-digger then doing it's part to render the main drag through town, Rufe Snow, relatively impassible. I started with RAF Azure Blue which, despite it's name, is ever so slightly purple. I masked-off sections and painted them purple (Dunkleblau and red) and violet (Intermediate Blue and more red). Had I stil been serious about trying to make the big-end the front, I would have painted the back end the dark purple, but I'd always wanted the big end to get the color. My last attempt to force the ship's apparent orientation was to use obviously english markings.
