[Magesblood]

I've had this idea where if you took a regular old soda pop bottlecap and adhered it to the top of a bussard dome, you could spray and get a gradient effect.

Never really had the chutzpah to actually attempt it.

think it's practical enough to work?

(by "chutzpah", I mean tes...intestinal fortitude, not impudence.)

 

[scotpens]

I don't quite see what you have in mind here. If you mean using the bottlecap as a painting mask, wouldn't that just leave a hard edge between the base color and the second color?

 

[Magesblood]

y'all would know better than me.

 

[aric]

If you kept your air brush at an angle where it wouldn't spray under the bottle cap, it should work. You would get just enough overspray under the cap for a small gradient.

 

[razorwyre1]

using a mask like that is tricky, and each one requires practice to acheive the effect you want. there are better easier ways of doing gradients.

on a hemisphere, where you want it to get darker toward the edge, basecoat in the darkest overall color, the color of the outer edges. mix up your lighter color, set your airbrush to a spray pattern about 1/4 the diameter of the hemisphere, hold your airbrush 2 or 3 times your normal distance from the sphere, aim at the dead center of the top of the sphere, and spray. (practice on a piece of cardboard first, and remember that its easier to do it too lightly and repeat the process than it is to do it too heavily and have to start over.)

ther reverse of this would be to basecoat in the lightest color, affix the bottom of the hemisphere to some object to elevate it, open your airbrush fairly wide, aim it just below the bottom edge of the hemiesphere, and rotate the elevating object & hemisphere while spraying.

 

[Jim NCC1701A]

I did something similar on a nav deflector to give it a 'lighted' look. Painted the deflector blue, then did a light spray of Tamiya white pearl through a small cut-out circle in a piece of card held away from the deflector. The white ended up being more concentrated near the middle of the defector with a 'dusting' out to the edges.
Didn't come out exactly perfect, but it didn't look too bad, IMHO.

 

[Magesblood]

okay, cool. Thanks all!

 

[Tim Nolan]

Man, I just have at it with the airbrush! I've done so many gradiated paint jobs it ain't funny! Practice, practice, practice! (thats one of the first things they teach you in airbrush class.....really! LOL)

 

[razorwyre1]

hers a slightly alternative suggestion to the original idea:
the tapered sides on the cap avoid a sharpish line on the finished hemisphere, while the smaller cap size takes into account the fact that the radius of the spray pattern increases with the distance to the object being painted. this would produce a better result than the original suggestion. (see attachment)

the real way to go about airbrushing an effect similar to the tos 1701's bussard collectors lit would be to create a hemispherical mask to simulate the "fan blades" that were beneath the surface of the dome (cutting up a ping pong ball?). this would need to be slightly larger than to dome itself to produce the soft focus effect. the dome would be painted the darker orange-gray of the less illuminated areas, and then the highlight colors gently sprayed through the mask.