Round Four Report from Garness-at-Home

Dread Pirate Garness writes:

Howdy, all. The report for this round of the Last Painter Standing contest is on the Jaguar Strike Craft. I will start by thanking everyone who has participated in this contest, Bill, i-Kore, and my wife and son who have been an endless source of inspiration for me.

When I first received this figure, I thought to myself: What am I going to do with this? It doesn't exactly look like a military vehicle. So I did some reading on the vehicle fluff. It is supposed to be the Viridian equivalent of an air force - coming in hot, ready to deal out death, and disappear as fast as you please.

With this in mind, I wanted to do two things with this model:

1. I wanted it to look fast, really fast
2. and I wanted it to have military markings and a little pilot "personal touch"

I began by cleaning all the mold lines off the model, and then test-fitting all the parts. The model was relatively a good fit in most places, except one part of the seat didn't fit correctly... but before I puttied it, I remembered my old Hummer in the army, and the hood that never closed all the way. Dreadfully annoying that was! So I left the small gap, to give the model a "not quite perfect" look.

Once I had drilled the holes and pinned the model together, I primed the figure in gray. I still wasn't sure exactly what the color scheme was going to be, so I painted the majority of the figure in Aleene's Deep Biege, and gave the entire model a wash with Americana Soft Black mixed with a Future Wax/water mix. (About 1-part paint to 5- or 6-parts mix is good for large surfaces, especially since it is a little thin, and takes a few coats to get a nice deep shade without getting puddle lines all over the flat surfaces.)

I decided then - after watching Saturday morning cartoons with my sons - that blue would be a good contrast color, and a good blend from dark to light would help with the sense of speed I wanted to convey. I had been looking at a few model planes in a modeling magazine, and I got the idea to put some thick color panels - like the Blue Angels have bright yellow on dark blue, and a lot of Air force and Navy fighter planes have a long strip along the fuselage.

I then got a-hold of some of high quality painters tape, cut some small strips, and placed them on the model where I wanted to paint the stripes.

I then painted Prussian Blue as the base for the stripes. I used the darker color for 2 reasons: first, I find generally easier to go from dark to light rather than the reverse, and second, that the Prussian Blue would make an excellent border (so I don't have to come back in later, and paint a black or dark blue line to separate the bright region from the brown).

As I was painting in the stripes, I found that some of the patterns I started out with were really bothering me, visually. So I went back and painted entire regions in Prussian Blue, like the wings, the air intakes alongside the pilot seat, and where the wings connect to the chair.