Wednesday, February 16, 2011

ADMG Part 7 - Painting your Moebius Galactica

Here's part 7 of detailing and accurizing your Moebius Galactica, emphasizing on painting your Galactica to look as close to the CGI model as seen on TV.

There is no fast and hard rules when it comes to painting your kits. Some does an excellent job using just brushes, others resort to rattle spray cans (cheaper and easier for them) and the remainder depend heavily on airbrush. Whichever way you uses, you will need to plan how you want to tackle the painting challenges.

The easiest and fastest method of course would be to use spray cans. If possible, cover your kit first with a coat of primer, then use a light gray tone where there are body armours. When dry, mask those body armours up, then coat your kit with a darker shade of grey. Then apply Acreations Models Decals (Deluxe set) to get those Aztec armour designs on your kit.

Some modelers try to stay away from decals as the effects produced by decals may not match the desired effects they want on their kit. Such modelers would spend hours masking their kits and painting them slowly. What may seem like ages to complete, well, when it is completed can literally blow the viewers away. I would term such work as masterpieces since a lot of time and effort was spent building her.

The Galactica's Colour Scheme

Since the new Galactica was a CGI model developed from the computer, its difficult to determine exactly what the correct colour scheme would be for her . A good reference guide would of course be the ZOIC Othos below. You will notice there are so many different variant of greys used on the armour section, and so many other darker shades of greys used in between the ribs. This is why most depend on Acreation Models' decals.


You can of course choose to try to paint all these shades in an Aztec manner, but bear in mind if you're going to do that,  you're going to need an airbrush set (also possible using just hand brushes but you need to have very good brushing skills to pull this off). You're also going to need the world's tiniest masking tapes - I recommend Micron Masking Tapes or at least the 1/2 mm set masking sheet . Tamiya's masking tapes are wonderful as well, especially for the armour section, but a tad too big for in between the ribs.

Since I have used a lot of Marko's and Cylon75's build to highlight the accurizing and detailing process for the Moebius kit, you would all by now seen how these two professionals painted their kits. Here's an expanded view of how others did theirs. The images were taken primarily from the Starship Modeler and Hobbytalk forum members' build.


What others have done

Here are some examples of fantastic build ups from others, and how they're kits look after painting. Look at how they did theirs, and hopefully their work would help you plan how you want to do yours.

Battlestar99's Build





Captain Shelley's Build







Gwsht5's Build




Jaws6266's Build, using metallic tones as the base colour







Jim's Build shades his metallic colours




Sean Farrel's Build





SG99's build





Superjedi's build, using Acreation models' armour decal set





And finally, here's BlackbirdCD's build, airbrushing the Aztec tones using a template and a straight edge card and coating his kit with multiple shades of greys.






From all these build ups, you can see there are multiple methods of painting up your Moebius kit. Its now up to you how you wish to tackle this baby. Yours could be the nest dazzling display yet to be seen.

Good luck.

More on Accurizing and Detailing your Moebius Galactica at

ADMG Part 1 - Intro to Accurizing and Detailing your Moebius Galactica
ADMG Part 2 - Accurizing/Detailing the Alligator Head Section
ADMG Part 3 - Accurizing/Detailing the Flight Pods
ADMG Part 4 - Accurizing/Detailing the Garage/Recess Section
ADMG Part 5 - Accurizing/Detailing the Main Hull
ADMG Part 6 - Lighting up the Moebius Galactica
ADMG Part 7 - Painting your Moebius Galactica


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