Revell 1/24th Gemini

Here's a rather nasty overexposed picture of my Gemini spacecraft. The older I get the more light I seem to need, and my workbench incorporates an overhead "light rack" with two halogen floods and a central halogen work light, and I also use two incandescent lamps as side fills. It gets a little hot, not to mention a little buggy, under all that light, but I have a hard time building in the dark.

I took a four or five year hiatus from modeling a while back, for various reasons (getting married being high on the list of reasons) and the Gemini was one of the first things I built after getting back into the hobby. Consequently, it isn't terribly good, and spending a year in storage and going through a couple of house moves didn't do it much good either.

I built it entirely out of the box. The finish is hardware store flat white and hardware store flat black, though I lightly sanded the flat white until the grey plastic of the raised hatches, screws and access panels just started to show, and I rubbed the flat black with graphite I harvested by rubbing a common pencil on a piece of sandpaper. I like the graphite-over-black look; it looks more metallic than just flat black, but it doesn't look overly metallic either. The crew and interior were painted for the most part with acrylic craft paint, and I used red craft paint, an extremely stiff brush, and masks made from masking tape to stencil on the red Velcro strips.

I'm pleased with it because it represents my return to a hobby I love, but I'm displeased with it because I think I could have done better.