COUNTERBLAST: ISW-69F Scout Ship

In lieu of the two-week 77191 Hydra challenge for Monday Miniatures, I instead chose to dedicate the time to assembling and painting the ISW-69F Scout Ship from Bombshell Miniatures/Airlock Games.  I haven't picked up the Hydra figure, and I've already got a sizable backlog of figures to complete, so I thought this would be a good opportunity to knock out a larger and more complicated project.  Behold, my take on the Scout Ship!

"She may not look like much, but she's got it where it counts, kid."

The ship mounted on the included flight stand.

The ship is primarily resin, with a few metal bits (the nose tip and landing gear struts and pads).  Overall it was a very clean mold and required very little clean-up.  There were a few areas where the surface was dinged up, but instead of patching those I decided to incorporate them into the paint scheme and go for a well-worn and "used" look (more "Star Wars" than "Star Trek", so to speak).  The model was assembled using standard superglue, though I used some putty to fill the minor gap between the two halves of the hull, as well as the mount for the engine section.  I left the landing gear and engine section separate until they were painted, since there are some tight areas between the engines and the fuel tanks which require some brush gymnastics to get to.

It's a little hard to see in the pictures above, but there is some subtle variation in the color on the body, as I went through a few rounds of basecoat/wash/layer/wetbrush trying to settle on a look that I liked.  Given the large flat surfaces on the ship, I didn't want it to look too "flat" and uniform.  I was also trying to avoid using metallics; they were used only on the landing gear struts and the copper on the nose and wing tips.  The navigation lights are based off the Cygnus spacecraft (thanks, Wikipedia!), though I mistakenly used yellow on the top light rather than white - oops!  Well, the crew can blame the last ship mechanic that worked on it for mixing up the lights...

The grunging-up of the craft was done primarily with black and brown washes, and a little bit of VGC Tinny Tin.  Considering I've never really done weathering of this type (or on this scale), I'm very pleased with how it turned out.  It's surprisingly challenging to figure out where something should look worn, both from a realistic perspective as well as an artistic one (after all, you want the overall model to sell the effect, and not look disjointed).

Since I completed the model early, I won't have an entry for this week's Monday Miniature (when everyone else should be finishing up their Hydras on Caffeineforge.com).  Next weeks' figure is 77039 Janan, Female Dragon Slayer, which should be fun.  I wonder how many of the chromatic dragon's we'll manage to cover?

Until next time!

- M:M