starboard
aft nude
bottom nude
bow nude
starboard nude
top nude
paint1
paint2
paint3
paint4
This ship was the largest and hardest to kitbash, and I started it before I'd even seen a "Gary". An inverted ship hull was the base for the ship, though the only part that shows is the nose. A 1/48th scale F14 bottom was the aft bottom, flanked by F4U4 Corsair fuselages. After that, things just got away from me, and I ended-up adding way, way more parts everywhere, thinking that the bigger the structure, the more complicated it will be, and it's easier to add parts and let their shadows enrich the surface, than to depend on complicated paint schemes. Turned out, I did both.
Painting started with a basecoat of gray sandable primer, then an overall coat of a yellowy gray. I never quite got the hang of individual panels, where a ship would be an overall yellow, say, but it would fade or get weathered, and individual panels would get replaced with new, original-color panels. I always treat panels like, "This section of the ship, for whatever reason, is supposed to be this different color." I did that here, but it looked too random and pointless. So, what better way to overcome a handicap than by compounding it, right? That is what happened here where I added greenish panels all over everywhere to compete with the yellow ones. Sanity took hold, after much wailing and gnashing of teeth, as it were, and, aided by inspiration, the resulting high-contrast color-illness was magically muted by a translucent coat of 50% Future floor wax and 50% Tamiya JN Gray.
