CultTVman: S. Matthew Coles's Klingon Bird of Prey

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	S. Matthew Coles's Klingon Bird of Prey

This is the good old AMT Bird of Prey. Built stock out the box, except the stand. I had a lot of fun building this ship: it practically fell together in a few days. Construction was pretty basic, and miraculously for ERTL, didn't require major alterations to accurize. I decided to position the wings in cruise mode, partially because most BOP's I see are attack mode versions, which on the AMT model doesn't look quite right. (I think the wing angles are too steep)

I started the paintwork (all paints were Humbrol Super Enamels) with an overall World War One Green colour, then overpainted this with a thin khaki drill coat, deliberately streaking the paintwork to give the ship a heavily weathered look. (I figure that the Bird of Prey is the Star Trek equivalent of an armor model, so I didn't hold back on the wear 'n tear.) The streaking blended the colours to duplicate the Bird of Prey green.

Over this base, I painted an apple-green semi gloss on the various coloured panels, also streaking it around the edges to make the panel edges more weathered than the centers. More olive green panels were painted on the bottom of the neck, landing pad doors, reactor cover etc. The red pattern on the bottom of the wings was also done in a patchy thinned semi-gloss paint, with the red wingtips painted more solidly to add an interesting flash of colour. To blend the panels and weather the ship, I lightly sanded it with 600 grit waterpaper until the original WWI green basecoat started to come through.

This gives the panels a worn-plating look like on old WWII bombers. I didn't go too overboard with too many of colours, keeping the scale of the ship in mind. I also didn't work too closely with references of the actual model, as I figure no two BOP's could look the same due to heavy repairs done on them.

All bare metal parts were done as follows: I mixed flat black and gloss silver for the beading between the upper and lower hulls. I also painted the warp coils/ radiator baffles (whatever these are) in a similar fashion, except I used gloss black with the silver. As for the other exposed panels, I used plain silver. Over this I added a very thin wash of rusty coloured brown. (I have a tin of light brown Humbrol that is so old the pigment has settled and hardened at the bottom of the tin, leaving an oily layer of brownish stuff on the surface. Brilliant for rust.)

The impulse drive was painted from the inside yellow in the center and red on the upper and lower surfaces. The grill detail over the engine was sone with my flat dirty silver-black mixture, as was the grill work around the photon torpedo tube.

To finish, the window ports were inked in with a fine point warm gray 8 Magic Marker.

When my Vorcha class cruiser is next on the project list, I'll give it practically the same paint job.

All the pictures were taken with a digital camera, dowloaded into my PC. I removed the backgrounds in Photoshop and replaced them with black. I adjusted the colour balance to match the actual model colours more closely.

S. Matthew Coles

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