Re-painted Home One MC80 for Star Wars Armada

Painted Home One MC80 Correllian  Cruiser for Star Wars Armada

The Project

I wanted to test out a couple of things in anticipation of an upcoming commission project,. Firstly, I wanted to get a good colour match to a German “Panzer Grey” colour that my client wanted for their ship, and secondly, I wanted to test out using blue UV paint in the ship engines.

Panzer Grey

This ship is not painted in panzer grey, let’s get that out of the way 😀.  While mixing up the colours for the hull (which was painted using stippling) I kept on adding too much blue to the paint mix. On the paint paint palette the colour looked OK to me, but when on the ship it is clearly far too blue!

I was attempting to match the colour to a picture of a model German tank. ,What I learned was that it’s important to see a whole big patch of the flat colour you are trying to replicate. When I took a sample of the flat colour from the image and create a big panel of it in GIMP it looked very different from when looking at the tank picture only. 

 

Vallejo Fluorescent Blue Engines

The Fluorescent UV blue looked great under UV light. I used the Vallejo Model Colour “Fluorescent Blue” paint – it’s very effective overall and I do recommend giving it a go.

There are a couple of issues with using this paint, though. Firstly, it can be messy. If you make small mistakes or get finger prints on you model, you probably wont see them unless under UV light, when they’ll be very obvious! This makes them a paint to fix since they can only really be seen properly under UV to be fixed.

Secondly, if you mix the UV paint with other colours, you will diminish the fluorescent intensity.  This means it’s difficult to highlight the UV paint since you’d want to mix it with a lighter colour.  You are left with two choices: have un-highlighted blue that glows under UV, or have highlighted blue that glows much less under UV. 

In this case, I chose to just wash the ship engines with a dark blue wash to give some depth to the colour, and do no highlighting.  

Re-painted Home One MC80 for Star Wars Armada
Re-painted Home One MC80 for Star Wars Armada
Re-painted Home One MC80 for Star Wars Armada
Re-painted Home One MC80 for Star Wars Armada
Re-painted Home One MC80 for Star Wars Armada
Re-painted Home One MC80 for Star Wars Armada

Engines with no UV light source

Re-painted Home One MC80 for Star Wars Armada

Engines with a UV light source

Re-painted Home One MC80 for Star Wars Armada

Engines with a UV light source