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The Neck
28 August 2006
The neck proved to almost sink my project, as I managed to lose half of mine in the process of working on my kit, but fortunately Perfessor Coffee over at the Hobbytalk forums helped me out with an extra he had. With that part, my project was back on track. The neck was also a turning point in that it was the first part of my model to be azteced, and thus was to be a case study for how well my gloss white on flat white approach would look on the actual model. My lighting scheme for the neck is pretty simple. I am using two red LED's to light the photon tubes at the base of the neck, and two white LED's to light the windows. The windows in the neck are filled with a single continuous piece of clear plastic, which makes it easier to light them with fewer LED's. Since I lit and assembled the the neck before painting, I had to mask the top, bottom, and photon launcher areas before I painted the rest of the neck. The first step was to paint the whole neck flat white. It isn't evident from the picture but the flat white came out a light grey color as I didn't apply enough coats and the grey primer shone through a bit.
Left: The
lighting scheme.
Right: Is it grey or flat white? ;)
With the flat white coat down, I could now apply the masks. This is the first part of the model that I've masked, and I discovered that these masks seem to have considerably less "stick" to them than the ones I used on my NX-01. I'm not sure if that is because of the humidity down here in SC, or if the materiel they are made of is actually different, but I'm not complaining. The reduced tack makes it easier to reposition the masks if I misalign them at first, and it also makes it less likely that the mask will remove any of the undercoat when removed. The downside is that the masks want to come un-stuck from the model on their own, so I have to make sure to smooth them down right before spraying the gloss white on. When the masks were removed, the final effect was revealed. I would have to call this an effective test, as the gloss white of the pattern catches the light exactly as I hoped it would. Becuase of the too-light flat white coat, the pattern stands out more than it would otherwise, so I will have to make sure to get a better coat of flat white on the other parts of the model.
Left: Pretty
in purple.
Right: The finished Aztec look.
Well, this update has been pretty short, and I've actually made a lot more progress since I completed this phase. I don't have time to do a proper update right now, so I though I would leave you with this shot as a bit of a preview:
Andy Rucker