Tom Grossman’s Andromeda page 4

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Painting I wanted the ship to be a blue-gray with some silvering in places to suggest weathering… or what ever you call it in space. I chose Model Master Acryl because its airbrush ready and on the shelves at the nearby Hobby Town. I mixed different proportions of Intermediate Blue and White using my “rows-of-little-drops” technique.

I chose a Base Color (BC) made from a 1:1 mixture of White and Intermediate Blue. I mixed Silver and my BC and chose a mixture of 6:1 Silver:BC for my Weathering Mix (WM).

I also tried different combinations of Silver and White mixed with Yellow Zinc Chromate (YZC). (PHOTO andr022) I decided to use 2:3 YZC to White as the Yellow Base color (YB). I would weather these areas with Silver.

I had just acquired the Iwata Eclipse HP-C that I used for this job. Great gravity feed airbrush with a built in cup. Like all Iwata airbrushes, the variable air valve offers lots of control. After adding the remaining parts of the hull, I painted it with a few coats of the BC with wet sanding in between. For the weathering, I airbrushed along the panel lines, keeping the bulk of the spray pattern on the leading edge side. I also did all the leading edges of the other shapes.

I repainted the trailing edges of the panels and other features with BC. During this process, I used the edge of a piece of paper as a floating mask. It took several applications of WM and BC to get the finish where I wanted it. But as my friend, Dave, at Lucky Neko said, “It’s not the paint job. It’s the touch-up”. The empty rear underside of the turrets would show so I cut sheet styrene to shape, glued it in place and covered the seams with Model Master Red Putty.

I used Parafilm to mask around the yellow areas and plastic wrap to cover the rest of the ship. These were base coated with YB and weathered on the leading edges with Silver. This also took several applications of YB and Silver.

That wrapped up the weathering.

On to part 5