Tiny Little Painted Star Ships
About a year ago I got some neat little resin ships off etsy. At first I tried to paint them differently from the movies out of some sort of lame attempt to deflect from them being from the worst movies in the world but eh, the prequels are fine movies with some great vehicle designs. Also I was really struggling with any paint job that wasn't rusty grey, so I decided last week to just paint them properly.
They're pretty neat models, not as accurate as I would like though, and tragically some parts are based on the clone wars. Also nothing scales to anything else which bugs me.
Always loved this ship. It was actually one of the first things I 3d modelled when I first took a drafting course back in highschool.
Annoyingly this model was lacking the bottom set of antennas. Looking at the etsy page, they're now using a different model that has a lot more detail similar to the core ship, and the bottom antenna, so that's nice.
I tossed together a 3d model of the antenna array and printed out a bunch and glued them on. Pretty happy with the results, even if you can barely see them.
The paint came out a bit darker than I would have liked, but other than that I'm quite happy with how it turned out. The main ball had some odd huge panels on it that really messed with the look when it was unpainted, but adding in the little light dots along the latitudinal lines really helps with the look.
Since I got the 3d printer set up for this I had the thought to add in some tiny landing craft. I made a super rough 3d model and printed off a bunch and stuck them to a little curved bit of clear plastic. I'm really happy with the final look.
Was always a fan of this ship, I had the cross section book as a youth and seeing how all the tanks and transports fit inside the wings was so cool. This is why, since I had the 3d printer ready, I thought I'd print off a bunch of tiny vehicles to decorate the base.
At first I had the thought of trying to cut the door off and modify it to look like it was open and have it more be a tiny diorama, but that would have been a lot of work and I don't think it would have been very successful.
So with the little ships I added to the Lucrehulk I can do a bit of a forced perspective shot!
The idea that the central ball can detach and land on these spindly legs is really neat. Also it reminds me of some of the landing ships in MechWarrior, which is a bonus.
Honestly when I bought these I thought they would be to scale with each other, so I was a bit disappointed. I did a bad job at reading the measurements I guess.
This one I probably could have mostly kept the original paint scheme I gave it and just added the oranges and greens, but I still primed and painted it anyway. Mainly because I didn't think of that until after I primed it.
Its a pretty simple ship but its quite cute. I like the hot pink thrust.
Even these are pretty wildly out of scale with each other.
This was the first one I painted. It was Sunday afternoon and I wanted to do something, but everything I tried was a bit too complicated.
The striping is a bit rough but it was fun to do freehand vs trying to mask them off. They're so tiny but the surfaces are really textured I don't think it would work out.
The engine cluster is also really cool, if hard to see.
I think in the lore this and the Munificent are supposed to be from different factions, made by different companies even, but they share a lot of design language, the Providence too, so that just feels...wrong. That's how I feel about a lot of starwar lore, it just feels incongruous with the depiction in the films
I really love how long and skeletal this ship is, it and the Munificent have a really cool look with these curved panels over exposed ribs.
As an aside: When I was watching the movie to get reference shots I noticed that there seems to be a second variant of the ship, lacking the super structure and side engines. I might do a post about that later because I find it fascinating.
I did briefly think about painting the Lucrehulk blue but I like the grey more. Also I glued all of these to the stands ages ago so painting it like that would have been quite difficult.
That store had a providence class too but... idk I'm not as big a fan. As it is, its pretty funny I ended up with two ships from each film.
The store had the option of them with stands and without. The stands were huge bulky things with dials on them that I guess are for some sort of game, which didn't interest me, so I saved some money and got them without the stand. Around that time I had started collecting some of the little Eaglemoss Star Trek ships and thought that they'd look nice on that style of stand, so I 3d modelled a similar stand, scaled for the different ships, and printed them all out.
As it happens recently I also got the new Master Replica USS Cerritos which came with this ugly square stand that was way too big. So I modified my stand model to accept the supports from the original stand and printed it out.
Much happier with this look. Also all the ships can be nestled together instead of spaced apart. I was also able to get the supports much closer together so they're not as obvious.
Nice little shelf of ships.
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