Jason I think you could build a 1:1 galactica in the same time those decals will take you

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Barry Evans

Great work Jason- I will never complain about stencilling again!

Cheers,

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On the bench:
1/72 Airfix Gazelle conversion
1/72 Revell F-16A
1/72 Revell Ec-135

Completed Builds

In the pipeline
1/72 Revell F-14D Tomcat diorama

22 01 2012
Beautiful job on a beautiful ship. It really captures the whole hard, military aspect of the re-imagined Galactica that puts it head and shoulders above the original from the 1980's. But also there is a certain grace in the lines and curves that sweep up from the brutal nose. Very clean lines.

Any chance you could show a picture with the rest of the Galactica 'body' with a ruler to show scale?
And can you explain the shoe-polish technique please for those of us on the forum please? It sounds interesting and looks very effective.

Keep up the excellent work.

Will you be building one of the Vipers? I'm a fan of both versions of the show.

Liam

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Mesa called Jar-Jar Binks. Mesa your humble servant.
I don't know. Mesa day startin pretty okee-day with a brisky morning munchy, then BOOM! Mesa gettin' very very scared!


I am the Rules Police. It's better than being the Thought Police.

Thanks for all the interest lads! I'll give a quick description here of the different techniques.

Firstly, I'm building this as a gift to a mate of mine, and I really want to do my best to make it look as good as possible. Hence me not only buying the kit, but also buying 2 PE sets and also the Deluxe Decals ( more about them later! ).

Secondly, I quickly realised that with the amount of detail on this kit, in the form of panel lines, ribs, pipes etc. etc., it would be quite hard for me to brush paint it and not have paint pooling in corners etc. As most of you probably know, I'm a brush-painter, apart from Halford Rattle Can Primer.

So, after some searches online, and looking at pics etc., I decided to use the Halford Grey Primer to prime it, and also as my base coat. I put some of the PE on first and then primed it all, a little heavier than normal really so I got a good base coat of grey. In the pic below it's mainly sub-assemblies all dry fitted.







More searching online brought me to the shoe polish technique. It's actually fairly easy, and effective, to do. You get one of those liquid shoe polishes with the sponge on top of the bottle. Give it a good shake, get the sponge nice and wet, and then apply it to one section of the model, making sure to get it into all the nooks and cranies. Then, while it's still wet ( and it dries quickly ), you give it a wipe with a cloth, removing as much as you want. As with most washes ( which is basically what this is ), the more you remove, the cleaner it will be, and I took a fair bit off the raised, flat areas, but obviously the sections between the ribs are recessed and more stayed there. This effectively stains the paint though and as far as I know, once it's dry, it's dry. Hence only doing sections at a time. It was a little awkward to get some of the excess out of some of the smaller corners, but it was fine really.

So, with the polish done, the grey was now a lot dirtier looking. It's not very uniform, but that didn't bother me as the Galactica is meant to be dirty and messy and most definitely not uniform! Below are some before and after shots, and then the whole thing...







Next was going to be the Deluxe Decals. There are a lot of them, I'm not sure of how many exactly, but easily around 600-700 I'd say. Between each rib is an individual decal :





To answer Vinny's question, you do the 'weathering' and *then* the decals cos the weathering is basically the whole kit, and any plastic that doesn't have a decal on it needs to be that dirty grey. Also, the decals themselves are quite transparent in places, and the dirty grey shows up underneath. I'm sure I'll do a bit more spot weathering after the decals are done.

Anyhow, to do the decals I needed a gloss coat, and once again brush-painting Future wasn't going to work! So I took advantage of Philip's generosity and visited him for a couple of evenings last week and used his Airbrush to put on the coats of Future. As Vinny said, when the polish dries it's a bit waxy, so we had to be careful not to put too much Future on or it would cause runs. That said, even a run here or there didn't really bother me, as it all adds to the look of a beat up ship!

So, with the Future done and dried, I got start on the Decals on Saturday. The first pic at the top of this thread shows the head section with just the 'armour' decals on ( the bigger decals covering the larger flat pieces of plastic. Once the decals were on and drying I used a blade to cut through all the panel lines to get back that depth. As you can see the 'mosiac' on these decals is quite nice, and it does let the dark grey plastic show through. I don't have a picture yet, but yesterday I did all the 'rib' decals on the same piece, these are a bit darker and add some mosiac patterns between each rib.

So, there you go, that's where I am now. In terms of size, it's about 13 inches in total ( the squares on my cutting pad are 1cm each ). The next few weeks will be doing all the decalling, and then another coat to seal them ( probably Satin, I'm not sure, I do like the shine as it adds to the 'metal' look ). Then, once all that's done, I'll look at glueing all the pieces together, they're being left separate to making the decalling easier.

Hope all that makes sense, if you've any questions let me know! :)

J.

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On the bench -
Revell 1:72 F-16B

Completed builds
Click here

Coming attractions -
Eduard 1:48 Bf 110 G-4
Academy 1:72 F-22a Raptor
Tamiya 1:35 T-55a
Moebius 1:128 Seaview

It looks good...

Just one more question, wouldn't the Klear and following clear lacquer peel off from the model? Taking that there is no way that it'll stick on waxy surface?
Am asking out of curiosity because what everyone else is trying to do is to keep the plastic - and paint - as clean as possible till the final stages to avoid fisheyes and adhesion problems and following delamination of individual paint layers.

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Filip

Thanks for explaining the shoe polish technique Jason. Very interesting and usual method but I don't think I'd have the liathróidí to use it on a build pre-painting and decalling. The issue of adhesion would definitely be a concern to me. It seems to be working out for you nicely though so I won't argue. Maybe the coats of Klear helped seal in the waxy surface. I would be careful if it comes to masking though. I think if I wanted to achieve the same result I would have heavily diluted some enamel gloss black and built up the effect using a couple of washes. At least that way you're dealing with something that you're used to its attributes. It would have given you a very similar result as you could have wiped it off too leaving an uneven surface. Hats off to your for experimenting anyway as that's what the hobby is all about. You have me thinking of the possible uses for shoe polish now (but I'd only use it at the end of a build). And I bet modellers were scratching their heads when the first guy said he put Future Floor Polish on a model.

Looks like a very cool build now that I can see it in it entirety. And those decals look crazy!!

Thanks for sharing.

Vinny

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"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
-Albert Einstein

Nice, dirty and dark... Don't know that TV show or comix or whatever that is, but it looks the business.

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Filip

have to say that is the best looking one ive seen done yet

Ooh, that looks interesting! :)

By the way, Moebius should have the Pegasus out this year, in the same scale as this Galactica ( 1:4105 ).

J.

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On the bench -
Revell 1:72 F-16B

Completed builds
Click here

Coming attractions -
Eduard 1:48 Bf 110 G-4
Academy 1:72 F-22a Raptor
Tamiya 1:35 T-55a
Moebius 1:128 Seaview