UPDATE: JUNE 26, 2011:
Holy cat soup! Progress!
Man, I've only had little bits and pieces of time over the last week or so to work on the dome. Just an hour here and there, so there aren't any photos of the dome in-work, only these finished ones.
Starting this past Friday night, I have a week-long break between semesters, and with the 4th of July coming up, that works out to 11 days with no reading, homework, papers, or projects for school!! I've been taking classes for 21 weeks straight, so this break will be fantastic.
The pics below show many hours of work. I have completed the application of all the silver onto the dome. Once again, Rafal's templates form an excellent basis for placing the major shapes. Using them in combination with reference pics gives a very accurate "damage map."
Keep in mind that I still need to do the gray misting over all the dome/lower cheek areas, so the silver areas you see are not in their final configuration.
Much of the silver will be misted over, and then retouched with a detail brush. There will be some areas that are masked and misted with the much darker gray, too.
I'm debating between 2 different grays for the misting stage, so I'm pausing till I decide. Heck, maybe I'll do a blend. . . I dunno.
There is so much silver damage on this bucket compared to the good ol' ESB!
As I'm sure many of you noticed in the pics above, the dark cheek crescents are done as well. Did you notice? Didja? Didja?
This is such an odd shade. Depending on which picture you look at, it sometimes appears almost Navy Blue, sometimes blue-green, and sometimes plaid.
OK, not plaid, just wanted to see who's paying attention!
The 2 colors most widely discussed for this area are Floquil C & O Enchantment Blue, and RLM 73 Green. I did color chips of each, and yesterday I said what the heck, why not try some blends?
So I mixed up some samples of the C & O and RLM 73 in different proportions and wound up using a 3:2 mix. That is, 3 parts C & O and 2 parts RLM 73. I think it cuts the "blueness" of the Enchantment Blue just enough, and adds that weird color shift depending on the light.
Here are a couple of closer pics to show what I mean. Depending on the angle and the light, the color looks sometimes more blue, and sometimes more green.
There were 3 small areas on the upper cheeks where I applied some masking fluid before airbrushing, to allow small chips of the base color to show through. After the cheeks had dried, I stenciled and applied the silver with my size 0 brush.
Whew! Sorry for the long post, I had to play catch up.
I have a lot of mundane real life stuff to do today. For some reason, my wife seems to think we need to have food in the house, so we're going to what is called a "grocery store." Apparently, it's a big place where food and food-related items are sold. Crazy, right????
More to come.