Models and figures, Sci Fi and Fantastic

After talking about the optical fiber and the Arduino programming, last WIP for this build up : the Imperial Star Destroyer paint job. Two major challenges in this paint job : the model is single-coloured (in fact that’s not totally true but that’s the most common representation) and the colour is hard to define : white ? grey ? grey-white ? Tricky. In this article I try to explain every step required to get a satisfactory result. Bye the way, many Star Wars ships (or others) can be treated this way.

A few weeks ago I began to make an Star Wars imperial star destroyer. I decided to educate my self on the Arduino cards. These cards allow to upload a program wich runs automatically as soon as the card is powered. I won’t explain here the all card operation ; if you’re interested you can go directly on the Arduino website. I just want to show you what you can do with an Arduino in your models.

Giving life to a model as the Imperial Star Destroyer from Star Wars cannot be sufficiently achieved by just assembling the model “out of the box”, it is necessary to light it up. I’ve already talked about lighting up a model on Fantastic Modelers but never using optical fiber. Optical fiber in scale modeling allows to realize a multitude of small spotlights on a model surface. These spotlights can represent dashboards lights or small portholes, depending on the scale. Here of course, they represent the countless portholes of the Star Destroyer.

Over the past few months, I’ve been working on an Enterprise model kit, at least a version of the Enterprise : the USS Enterprise NCC-1701-A. I won’t review again this model work, you can find many details here. Before I was ordered this kit, I knew nothing (John Snow) about Star Trek. I saw a few episodes when I was a kid but I did’nt imagine the extent of this universe. I won’t tell the all story of Star Trek (more than 700 episodes during 6 TV shows…) but instead have a look on the different Enterprise ships being at the center of the shows and the movies, using my modeler’s eye of course.