Babylon 5 Starfury Model

After two months, I have finally 'finished' the Starfury model.


The painting is really untidy in places, and I really could not be bothered with the dozens of tiny water-slide transfers.  That said, I am still stamping this as DONE because it was getting really tedious towards the end.

I love the Starfury design as a nod to Newtonian mechanics in sci-fi.  It is the most believable space fighter I've ever come across and I'm really glad I have finally got round to building this.



The model design itself has many flaws.  Many of the pieces didn't fit snugly together, and the lower guns had to be literally chopped in half to get them stuck on.  They must have known of these flaws and just decided to ship it anyway.  After all, it's only fanboys like me that would buy it.

I didn't have the right grey to paint it, so I mixed the colour from Vallejo's Cold Grey and some cheap white acrylic.  It's come out a little more blue than I wanted, but not badly enough for me to do anything about it.

Using a mix for large flat areas made my life very difficult because if a subsequent mix of the paint is even slightly off, there are no hard edges at which to hide the difference - it's all really obvious.  If I hadn't chosen to use a mix, I would probably have gone back and tidied up the edges a lot more thoroughly.

However, I am pleased with the blending to bring out the curves.  It was difficult to get it visible without being a cartoon-ish outline but I think I got there after a few attempts.

I wanted the engines to have a bronze-like colour.  I figured straight-up silver/gun-metal would have looked out of place on a non-miniature.  I used a mix of Vallejo chocolate brown and black as the base colour, then chocolate brown and Citadel's leadbelcher, and finally a mix of chocolate brown and Citadel's Runefang Steel for the highlights.

You can see the really untidy edges around the nozzles in this picture:



I was in two minds about whether to use the water-slide transfers or not.  I hate how they give patches of gloss to an otherwise matte model, and putting transfers on non-flat surfaces can be really tricky.  There are a few wrinkles in the ones I've used.  On the other hand though, I was growing tired of the model and didn't want to spend ages hand-painting Ivanova's logo - especially when any mistakes would've meant re-mixing the background grey.

You can see how the gloss of the transfers shows up in this picture. :(


I was ridiculously pleased with my painting of the display panel inside the cockpit.  Less so when I realised I'd glued that piece in upside-down, but still...


Overall, I'm happy with it in my display cabinet.  I just won't be inviting too many people to observe it close up! :D


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