Fire Your Turbos! It's Viper time!

Of course no Colonial fleet is complete without the turbo charged, built to last, Viper! Another kit from Moebius models this sucker also practically fell together out of the box. Went on a merry hunt for the new Battlestar kits at the Orlando Megacon and this was the only one that turned up. Lucky find n a bottom shelf. When I got it back to the hotel room to check it out, wow I was surprised!

When I first cracked everything open I was actually surprised at how similar it was in parts breakdown to the old Revellogram kit. But that is where the similarities end! Molding quality is top notch and detail is precise and abundant, the thing practically snaps together! Moebius has really gone the extra mile to ensure that THESE are the kits people will be hunting for and building for the next 15-20 years when working on Battlestar subjects.

While not as ingrained into my psyche as the Galactica, I have also held a great love for the classic design of the Viper. It's got the charm and lines of the X-Wing and the raw power and weight of a Saturn V. Really just a brilliantly simple design. And I've also completely loved the later redesigns in the NuBSG (Mk II and Mk VII), they took that sleek power and refined and cleaned it up while also adding in an unmistakable real world design ethic.

 The Viper was built with all the bells and whistles!  The paint job falls somewhere in between studio scale nasty (The studio models looked like they flew through a coal mine) and full size prop pristine. The ship was fully painted in Model Masters and Tamiya Acrylics.

 New dome base allows me to position her in flight poses.

HIT YOUR TURBO! Lights on! When switched on the six LED lights from a cheap flashlight brighten up the room and make this baby look like she's hunting down Raiders! 

I was especially proud of the Paint chipping techniques I used all over the red stripes. There's only one decal on this entire model and it's inside the cockpit!

After spritzing with water, salt is applied to the model which is then painted over and brushed off revealing beautiful weathered stripes. Worked like a dream!

I wasn't thrilled with the pilots face so out came the Dremel! I ground out the face and hollowed out the helmet, then used a 1/35 scale military figure to perform a head transplant. Much better!

Here you can see the display screen lit up by a single LED. It is covered by the kit included decal for the screen.

I tried to give the guns and the end of the engine nozzles a bit different color/weathering to imply the super heating from repeated laser fire/turbo boosts.

Full on view of the rear end! I left the entire back panel removable to service the batteries and lights. Slides right off!

 The starboard aft landing gear cover is removable in order to access the push button switch which controls the lights. I do have to touch up two areas of missing stripe on the underside port/starboard. 

Here goes two generations of Viper. All in all I am super happy with my collection of Vipers from Moebius, they have really outdone themselves by producing tremendous kits from stellar television series. Soon I'll spotlight the modern Vipers I've built, as well as spotlights on the lighting of Galactica, and the modern Battlestar's Galactica and Pegasus. 

  

Fleeing from the Cylon Tyranny...

...The last Battlestar, Galactica, leads a ragtag fugitive fleet on a lonely quest...

Well here it is! I waited a long time for this build to come along. The classic Battlestar Galactica! 

The design of this ship holds a powerful nostalgia for me. I remember in the very early days of my internet exploration finding out about culttvman's website. For me it was a revelation, growing up in Hialeah Florida there were few people that I knew of other than my father and I who were even vaguely interested in science fiction let alone building models of spacecraft.

If there were any people my age doing it they certainly weren't living on my block!

To find that there was some kind of community out there and that they were active and doing new and interesting things provided a powerful boost of self esteem. Then I stumbled upon Starship Modeler, the IDIC page, Phil Broad's website of beautiful behind the scenes photos. To see the things that people were building and working on opened up whole new avenues for which I am eternally grateful. Most importantly it also opened the doors to new worlds of science fiction that I had never been exposed to. That's where the Galactica entered my life.

Of course I had seen Star Wars and Star Trek but when  I stumbled onto the Galactica my mind was blown. I hadn't even seen the series, but this ship was unbelievable! The Vipers, the Raiders, the shuttle. Everything mystified me. But the Galactica remained just about the coolest thing I had ever seen. When I got to high school I began attempts to scratchbuild Galactica with less than stellar results (though it still looked better than the monogram kit, which I could not afford) This early scratchbuild still survives although it has been thrashed bashed and unfinished for ten years now. I just don't have the heart to mothball it.

My old Galactica.

 Vastly unfinished.

 My first foray into major scratchbuilding.

I cant begin to fathom building one of these at 72 inches long with all those original donor kits...

Finally my big Galactica fix was satiated in 2004 when NuBSG arrived. For the record I love and adore NuBSG. It is my second favorite television show of all time only by virtue of Star Trek: TOS having captured my imagination at a much younger age. I thought it was a great series and still do, and it did something else, it brought Galactica back into the mainstream! Without it, I highly doubt Moebius models would have released their fantastic classic Galactica kits. So without derailing the post too much for the NuBSG detractors I present my Classic Galactica build!

Moebius has consistently surprised me with their fantastic kits, high on detail, easy to construct and just plain fun to build. The Galactica was no different.

 They really left nothing out! Oh I'm sure anyone can nitpick things, but compared to the days of old (science fiction modeling) this kit is light years beyond my wildest dreams! 

 Adding in the Paragrafix detail set only refined and perfected an already PERFECT kit. This thing is truly a work of art.

 The ship practically falls together out of the box.

Being part of a detail obsessive modeling community I couldnt help but just tweak some things here and there to make this kit really shine! Some small fiddly bits of detail were added here and there to help the ship really pop.

 Recessed areas over the main engines were drilled and hollowed out, to give a greater sense of depth. 

The biggest change I made to the kit was to scratchbuild the eyebrows over the equipment bays on the head. Again, just to give a bit more depth and to more accurately reflect the filming miniatures original parts. 

You may notice that underneath the ship is something a little more than a standard brass tube for mounting. That's right it's a coaxial connector!

BECAUSE THIS BABY LIGHTS UP!!!

LOTS MORE TO COME IN PART TWO!!!

Lighting the Galactica!

...For a shining planet, known as Earth!

Is that the Six Million Dollar Man's boss?

Yes it is! It's Oscar Goldman! Head of OSI. He was sculpted in the same fashion as the first two heads. Beginning with a core of aluminum foil and working outward with translucent Sculpey. I feel better and better about each heads likeness. What sets Oscar off is his handmade glasses.

 Raw Sculpt (Pre-ears/Hair)

They are soldered together from .020 guage Copper wire and set him off perfectly. I do have to make on final paint pass over him to just tweak his skin tone and hair, and I need to fabircate the lenses for his glasses, but I think this one is a winner!

The Six Million Dollar Sculpt PART 2

In spite of all the sanding you do when you're working with the now baked Sculpey, you are bound to miss lots of little nubs and imperfections present in the sculpt. Therefore it is helpful to shoot a coat of primer over the head in order to highlight these flaws.

I like to start with a simple coat of a single color. I airbrush a coat of Tamiya Flat Flesh acrylic. Once it is dry you can then examine the surface. 

Using progressively finer grained sandpaper I work down the surfaces to be nice and smooth. Meanwhile alternating with my Dremel tool using grinding bits and sanding wheels to get in the nooks and cranny's and remove burrs left over from sculpting. Also I take this opportunity to sharpen any areas like the edges of lips and eyelids. 

 Once the sculpt has been sanded down to my satisfaction I use a pad of synthetic steel wool to burnish the surface smooth as possible and then a cloth, usually old t-shirt material, to finally polish the surface of the head.

It is important to wash your hands frequently in these final stages so as not to have any grease from your hands present on the Sculpey, this can cause paint adhesion problems later on.

Once satisfied with the smoothness I mix together the basic flesh tones that I am looking for and airbrush first a light overall flesh tone, then a highlighting one. The highlights go on the elevated surfaces of the face, bridge of the nose, forehead, chin, cheekbones etc. The figure at this point looks very pale and lifeless but toning the skin will come later.

Next I mix for brush painting a dark brown/red color to sink into the deep parts of the face- eyelids, inner ears, nostrils, lips, and deep skin folds.

I also begin painting in the eyes. I use Model Master Acrylic sand for the whites of the eyes since the whites are REALLY off white. I then apply the colored parts of the eye by making the dark ring around the iris, then the iris color, finally the pupil.
I decided not to paint a tiny white catch light on this eye and instead sealed them up with a heavy coat of gloss clear. This gives them a much better, more realistic look.

 The lips are picked out in a darker flesh color, but not in broad flat tones the darker color is used to paint in ridges vertically along the length of the lips. I also add in the eyebrows at this stage. It's beginning to look more and more human.

Once the detail brush painting is done, its time to bust the airbrush back out. This time I mix a very thins blend of gloss clear orange and gloss clear red.
 This will be used as a filter to spray over the surface and darken the skin as one see's fit, much like applying a spray tan. This also helps to smooth and blend together the brush painted detailing.

The final thing to be added in is Steve's hair. It is based in a lightened brown tone. Once that dries, the hair is brushed with golden yellow to highlight the strands and then I bring back the sand color to add some high points here and there throughout the head. Finally a dark brown is brought back in as a wash to add into some of the crevasses and deepen the hair.

All in all I think the sculpt turned out pretty damn good and the paint came out great. Now he just needs a body and some clothing. There will definitely be more to come!

Where am I gonna find a blue leisure suit in 1/6th scale?

The Six Million Dollar Sculpt

After sculpting my own head and working out the trial and error of the process, I busted out the Sculpey once more in order to work on a famous head. I wanted mostly to see if the first sculpt was actual skill or lightning in a bottle.

I chose a fairly benign subject to test it out on, Lee Majors as Steve Austin the Six Million Dollar Man.

I began with a working drawing, which while it may not look exactly like him, functions as a blueprint. This allows me to breakdown all the planes of his face and the major surfaces and shapes, well before scupting them. I worked from photographs and DVD stills to generate this drawing.

I also utilized copious amounts of photographs from any which angle I could get, in order to fully realize his facial features.  

 The entire head is sculpted in Translucent Sculpey. i find it works much more smoothly and bakes much more easily than standard white. Although there are still some things I would prefer to use the white for.

 During the initial sculpting the head is made with a core of Aluminum foil rolled into a roughly head shaped ball. This not only uses less sculpey, but makes it more firm and reduces the baking time.

The eyeballs are formed by first plugging two 4 mm metal craft beads into the eye sockets then sculpting the lids around them. 4 mm is a standard reference size for human eyeballs in 1/6th scale which is the size in which this head was sculpted.

When it came time to sculpt the hair I was lucky enough to have been watching the show on TV so I got pretty good looks at his hair and the way it lays over his head as I was sculpting.

 Details like eyebrows, fine eye wrinkles, forehead creasing sideburns and hair strands were left till just before I shoved him into the oven. Once hardened and left to sit overnight I sanded down the entire surface and polished it as smooth as possible to prep it for painting.

PAINTING COMING UP IN THE SIX MILLION DOLLAR SCULPT PART 2!