3DAlienWorlds BLOG

Painting the fusion reactor

Here's a quick guide to painting the new Taui Fusion Reactor, with a super handy shortcut for saving some time on the base section!




£ The base section was the first part to paint, and I saved some time by masking over the exterior lines I wanted to leave as clear filament, and then spraying with a rattlecan of light grey matt paint.

For the Taui Landing Pad, I had carefully painted each hexagon on the pad by brush, and it had taken hours and hours! Since the floor of this fusion reactor is not such a focal point, I decided to save lots of time by investing in a thick-nibbed paint pen. This probably would have taken hours to do with a brush (especially since it's white!), but this only took a few minutes! Strongly recommended!

£ After pulling off the masking tape, the interior of the base section was complete.

£ The next step was to paint the surfaces of the reactor in a sandy yellow. I used cheap Americana Camel acrylic paint to cover every surface of the model, except the recessed blue lines and the interior hexagons. This took 3 coats to get a smooth finish, but at least every coat was faster than the last!

£ I used GW's Flayed One Flesh to highlight the edges of each panel, and then an even thinner edge highlight of Bleached Bone to make it really pop.

For the monitor, I roughly painted a 'reactor powering up' kind of display, but if you have the time you could try printing a custom transfer from a sci-fi movie?

£ At this stage it was time to glue it together. I found it was easiest to do this by gluing the central core to only one tower, and gluing that tower to the base. Once that was properly dry, I glued the other tower into place on the base and to the core. Pretty perfect fit!

£ One last thing I wanted to do was brighten the central core. Although I plan to use LEDs to light up the model and the central core, there will be times when I'm not using LEDs so it seemed a good idea to lighten it slightly anyway. So I masked the two towers off, and pulled out my airbrush.

Oh no!! My airbrush had died!

So I couldn't use a light blue paint carefully and smoothly airbrushed on the central reactor core! What a pity! I had to use a cheap rattlecan of matt white instead, with one quick vertical spray pass from about 30cm away. It wasn't perfect (you can see the specks of paint in the photo), but I guess it will do okay?

Currently I'm just sorting through the pics and videos of the new fusion reactor, so it will be ready for release in a few days! 

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