Parker and I picked up this outstanding new Minicraft 1/700 Titanic at the grand opening of Marshall's new Hobby Lobby recently, and I'm thoroughly enjoying finally getting to work on a waterline Titanic, especially one in my favorite scale!
Unlike the previous 1/700 scale Titanic we started on, the kit has the correct bow and stern sheer, so it's worth putting some effort into. And the lower hull pops off easily, so you can display full hull (which is what Parker wants) or waterline (which is what shall be).
But the thing that makes this kit special is the MCP (multi-colored parts). Parts are cast in hull red, black, white, tan brown, orange and gold so that you can build a pretty good model without using paint at all.
Yeah, like I'm doing that. So after an afternoon researching what paint colors best represent, um, black and white, I airbrushed all the kit parts the correct historical shade, as shown to the left.
See, obviously much better, right? Well, the funnels definitely needed White Star Buff, but as I explained to Parker, the real reason to paint everything was so that the detail painting would match.
After getting that done, I spent the first day building the forecastle, after which I skipped ahead a few steps so I could glue it into place. Most of the time is spent detail painting the deck details, excluding the wood deck railing tops. I'll do that at the very end when I can confirm which railings were metal and which were teak.
I should also point out in picking the colors, we have a real-time White Star ship to model it after, the tender Nomadic which is restored in a dock near the Titanic's original slip in Belfast. Parker got a couple of quick pics of it last summer, and of course the Internet has more.
Nomadic is best know for shuttling passengers to and from the Titanic during its brief stopover in Cherbourg in April 1912. For many years it was a restaurant in the Seine in Paris, but came back to Belfast a few years ago and has been completely restored.