As the whole ship was now together, it was time for painting. My researches showed that the original filming model was a light blue colour, but it doesn’t look it on screen. I mixed my own starship grey with a bit of blue in there just so it wasn’t too far out from blending in with the decals. Unfortunately, this custom mix ran out as I’d almost finished the spray job, and there was no way I’d ever be able to mix the exact colour again! I decided that the colour was too dark anyway, so I mixed up a new batch of paint (enough to go round this time!) and repainted the whole thing. I think the colour is just about right, but it doesn’t show up on screen very well.
Once that was satisfactory, I had to do some masking for the detail painting. The D is festooned with things which are a different grey from the main hull, like impulse engines, phaser rings, shuttle bay doors and star drive blisters. It took me two hours to do the fiddly masking on all these areas, a task made more difficult by the fact that most of the raised structures to be painted had rounded ends. A compound curve on the phaser ring is hard enough to mask accurately without rounded ends too! I solved the problem by using my punch set to punch holes of an appropriate size out of masking tape which could then be opened with a scalpel and used to mask the ends. 22 of the little illegitimates… Two hours of masking and ten minutes of airbrush work produced this.
When the masking was off, and after a couple of minor touchups, the results weren’t too bad.
I tried to get the glow of the main deflector by judicious airbrushing, and without lighting it, I think this was the best I was going to get.
It’s not accurate, as I was going for the impression of the blue glow effect, rather than have it as a solid colour. The filming model looked very strange in this area when unlit. I’m attempting to show it as it appeared on the screen, rather than as a replica of the filming miniature – what IS right doesn’t necessarily LOOK right.
Right, after some pretty intricate masking around the warp nacelles, the glowing bits were given a coat of shiny silver before being over-sprayed by the transparent red or blue colour as appropriate. The yellow bit between them was painted too, and as the masking came off, this was the result.
Just a bit of touching up to do around a couple of edges, but overall it seemed to have been successful. I gave these a coat of gloss ready for decals.