Yamato Model Project

While wandering around Sakuracon '07 a while back, I stumbled into a screening of the classic anime Space Battleship Yamato. As the name suggests, it is about a future where Earth is under alien attack, and the survivors resurrect the sunken remains of the IJN Yamato as a space ship to fight off the aliens. While I had heard of this series before, this was my first actual exposure to it. While the plot and animation were a little dated, it was still pretty entertaining. Later, when I was browsing in the dealer room, I ran across a small model of the ship, and at $3.50 I couldn't resist buying it! Building the model was fairly simple; a single exploded diagram provided all the necessary instructions. For painting, I actually used Games Workshop Citadel colors, following methods I developed in painting my Battlefleet Gothic ships. First, I painted the basic grey and red colors on the hull. Then, I applied a couple of black ink washes to darken the colors and add shadows. I then added highlights  by dry brushing over the red and grey with slightly lighter shades. Finally, I touched out a few details such as the guns and engines with a metallic steel color. The base was painted flat black, with a little gold dry brushed over the lettering. The final result came out about as I was hoping; the biggest problem I had was that the black ink washes got a little heavy in spots. Still, this little guy came out pretty good considering this is the smallest model I've built yet!

 

The instructions were all in Japanese, though fortunately this diagram explained them pretty well!	Here is my finished effort posed in front of the box top.
This side view shows some of the shading accomplished with the ink washes.	Here is a bow quarter view.
Here is the Business End. The detail of this model was mostly pretty good, although the cannon in the front was somewhat lacking.	This stern show shows how the engine was painted a steel color to highlight it a little more.
This reference shot shows just how small she is! The box doesn't list a scale anywhere, but using the 800 ft. length of the actual WW II Yamato and the 5 in. length of the model, it works out to approximately 1/2000.	Here is a shot of the stand. The camera flash reveals where I touched it up with some black paint after dry brushing the gold, but this isn't visible to the eye.