Oops. (Painting)

Finally it was time to paint!
First up, a dark metallic silver over the base coat.
Once that had dried, I spent quite a while applying masking tape to the struts and panels.
I then blended some black into the paint and applied a coat to the exposed areas.

It dried Ok, my brushwork needs practice (I don't have an airbrush, or the skills to use one - and couldn't really justify the cost for this little project...). The surface does have quite a nice metallic sheen to it, visually much more interesting that a plain glossy plastic surface. However. There was a problem...

If you recalled from earlier - I'd etched detailing into each of the panels, while this was still just visible on the bottom of the ship, virtually none could be seen on the top - all the planels looked flat and really not that great. Somewhat disappointing.

At this point, I considered 2 options (3 if you include scrapping it all!). First, to cut out some new panel shapes out of some very thin styrene sheets which I could quite easily cut to fit. I could re-etch these and apply them over the existing panels.  That would requirer much more gluing, sanding and painting. The second choice was to attempt to re-etch the panels in place. While that sounded tricky - I figured if I made a mistake, I could still go with the replacement panel option.

I taped the ship down to keep it stable. Then slowly re-etched the surface. Getting better...

The newly eteched lines looked rather white. I also wasn't completely happy with the way the dark and light silvers sat together. I had no real plan for how it should look - initially I was tempted to have it look a lot more like Ian's but I decided to go with a somewhat darker look. Time to dirty things up a bit. Using some black mixed with the dark metallic silver I made a wash and went over the more of the surfaces.

Not the greatest photos ever taken - and still work in progress here - but you can see how the wash has bought everything down a couple of shades, and the lighter silver plates now look like they're covered in some kind of oily residue. Just right for an old ship that's spent it's life hanging around in backwater space stations.