Building a Better Narcissus by John Ovington part 4

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Final Touches

At this point the model had the right overall feel without looking dirty, but some areas needed to be pushed a bit darker in value to better match the character of the ship as seen on screen, as well as developing more of the “ins & outs” to help describe the shapes just a little more clearly.  Going subtly darker were areas such as the “knees” on the low engines, the area between the low engines, the “well of snakes” (as I came to call it) in the center of the lower hull, the gap detail in the nose, the upper rear side panels, and the little bits of detail around the windshield and down the central ridge.

Last item was to pop out the rear hatch and install the glass. It was glued in with tacky glue.

There is no formal display base at this point, just the generic wooden base I use for shooting photos. The 1/4″ K&S brass tube is painted with Krylon Ultra Flat Black.

CONCLUSIONS

Damn this kit took a long time to finish, nearly 5 years off and on. Through that time, I’ve lost interest in it and found it again more times that I can count. Each new piece of research I discovered inspired some activity, whether forward or reverse. As I noted in the introduction, I’d intended for this kit to be something like an “Ultimate Anal Narcissus”, but even though its certainly not that, I’m satisfied with the process as much as the result …and, as we used to say in the days when I did decorative restoration work, its better than it was.

To be honest, any lack of ultimate unattainable perfection is not entirely due to my tardy research, some of its just plain sloppiness on my part. For example, there are plenty of places (some more obvious than others) where I was so jazzed by the whole vinyl panel thing that I got a little too happy and not too straight with the ole X-Acto. There were also one or two unexpected results – I found at the weathering stage that the areas where the kit’s line-work had been filled and vinyl applied on top (bottom hull panels) tended to take the washes better and looked more realistic than the areas that still had engraved lines bordering raised vinyl panels. Because of that, in future attempts at this kit I’ll probably fill in all the existing engraved lines before applying the vinyl.

The text and photos, as much as they document a journey of sorts, have also survived a journey. Much of the text and many of the photos were lost when my computer crashed 3 or so years ago, and over the time since, I’ve been able to recover or reconstruct.

I hope any who have looked though this build up find my observations useful. Thanks to the fabulous Twila for her steady and easy support of my many obsessive long-term projects like this one.

John Ovington

Bibliography/References

Alien – the movie itself
Narcissus Kit Review By  Olivier Carbourdin
Martin Bowers Model World website
Alien – Movie (Photo) Novel, Ed. Richard   J. Anobile