Star Trek U.S.S. Excelsior Part 5: The Devil in the details

My Fears of screwing up the saucer paint job were, of course, unwarranted. But I like to aim low so that when I hit the mark it's all the better.

It took me a day or two to get all the masks onto the bottom of the saucer. Tedious work, that. I actually had to do it twice because I put them on wrong the first go around. It really helps to look at Lou's instructions while doing it. 

 The top didn't take nearly as long. I think I got it done in a few hours. This time I had the instructions handy. ;)














I mixed up a slightly lighter version of the base gray color and went over the whole thing. I peeled up a few masks and saw that there wasn't enough contrast so I went over the whole thing again.










After peeling off the masks I went over it with the lighter gray again to blend it all together and tone it down. This is a tricky step that can easily be overdone. I wasn't really sure if I liked it until I exposed the blue areas and then it all came together.








The bottom gave the same great results. There are a few little nit-picky issues here and there, but overall I think it came out pretty well.

 As you can see, lighting greatly affects the color! In the paint booth it looks almost white while under dimmer lighting it appears gray.

With all the painting done I was able to snip down all the fiber optics. They all still work, thank Dog.












My next step is to clean up all the windows. To get the ambient lighting from inside the model up the the "surface" where the windows are, I am inserting small snippets of fiber optic into each window hole. This is working out great.

I've also re-masked and gone over the secondary hull and warp engines to tone the color down to better match what I have done on the saucer. I will show you all of that in the next part. Stay Tuned!