Busy day today. First I got a reminder in how bad GW varnish sucks. I spent about an hour repainting parts of my Starfuries.
After that I got down to some serious painting and tackled the Hyperions. I generally like to do my least favorite minis first, get them done fast, and then move on to something I expect to enjoy more. I was right in thinking I would not like painting the Hyperions much.
My idea was to take the metallic grey I had mixed and paint the entire body in that. Then I would dry brush several layers of white over it. I wanted a ship that looked like it had seen a lot of action and was ready for some time in dry dock and a fresh coat of paint.
The problem I ran into is, when I started the dry brushing of white, I found that the surface was not flat enough. Most of the surfaces were rough and the dry brushing did not cover enough surface area. Worse, some of the detail on the model had been so smoothed out that dry brushing was enough to get paint in them. I had to change plans.
What I decided to do was go with a bright white paint job. Since I had primed black then painted on a basecoat of grey, this meant a lot of white would be needed. Rather than paint one thick coat, and lose all detail left in the model, I painted on several thin layers of white. This still wiped out a lot of detail, but there was enough left to be seen if you get close enough.
Then I did some blue lines to make it look a bit more like the show. 'Course all the EA ships on the show looked like unpainted metal other than the blue, but that is too damn boring for a game.
Here are the final results:
And a close-up:
I had planned to do a lot more with the little saucer bit. It never worked out like I had planned. I tried to ink it and then dry brush over it with no luck. I tried and picking out the details with little success. The detail is too muted, and then covered with too much paint. At this point I am just happy they are not always falling off.
I'm pretty happy with how they came out. They are clearly not showpiece quality, but they are up to table top standards.
Being on a roll, and having nothing else to do, I moved on to the Artemis Heavy Frigates. Since they were in much better shape I decided to try the dry brush technique I attempted on the Hyperions. This time I skipped the grey basecoat and went straight to the white dry brushing. If it did not work out well, there would at least be less paint mucking up the detail on the figures.
Things went much better this time. While the paint did get into some of the detail work, I was able to fill them in with black paint and re dry brush around them.
The finished product:
And a close up view from below:
The ships look old, like they have seen better days, but are still plugging along. I may go back and pick out some detail on the front and engines. Still undecided.