Primer, Deck Paint and Starfighters
I painted the flight deck of the space carrier the same gray color that it was underneath the hangar. Then I weathered it with streaking and tire marks from the service vehicles.
Happy with how that turned out, I taped it over with blue painters tape and sprayed the whole model primer gray. I used Tamiya primer in a spray can. Usually I use regular car primer paint for this task. But I had two cans of the primer and it was a lighter shade of gray that would set it apart from the other Alliance warships from that era of the Star Saga.
The Tamia spray can primer does extremely well with the smaller details of the model. Happy with that, I then removed the tape from the flight deck. Starting to look much better after that.
One of my favorite moments in doing a scratch build is seeing the all gray primer. You can start to tell if your detailing efforts worked or not. So far, I’m pretty satisfied with this ship. The next step is to create some starfighters.
I needed at least a half dozen or so tiny Spieron starfighters and didn’t really want to scratch build each one. So I pressed my son to make me some 3D printed starfighters to scale. I knew he had modeled the Spieron in Blender a few years before, so he had a model to work with. The first few attempts were not great.
The wings were the biggest problem to print. So I had him just print me some bodies and I would build the wings with sheet styrene.
I wasn’t concerned with how detailed they were, because on a book cover, the resolution would not even detect the scan lines. So I added them to my deck kit and I wait for him to get around to printing me a handful more of them.
Here is a fun shot of a cardboard 1/48 Spieron I built with the two 1/350 scale prints.
That’s all for now. I need to finish the tiny fighters and deck trucks and then build the greenhouse cage around the flight deck. The final piece to be built will be the giant wire antenna on the back of the ship. Still pondering how to tackle that one. After those sections are complete… weathering time!