Paint
&
Hull Graphics
Before we start, I need to make an important caveat relating to colour matching, and the difference between what we all saw on-screen, and what the actual colours were/might have been on the original studio model. This is probably old news to a lot of people, but for those who don’t know here’s a blunt summary of how the 4’ Enterprise D studio model was actually painted:
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It wasn’t shades of grey. It was pale blue and pale green. Yep. Blue and green.
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Andrew Probert, who designed the D, specifically chose those blue and green tones in a conscious decision to steer clear of the generic shades of greys seen on almost every other spaceship or vehicle in science fiction. The shades of greys we all ended up seeing on screen was a result of intentionally shifting those blue and green hull tones and washing them out into greys during post-production, making Probert’s creative choices utterly redundant! Now, if you’ve kept up with all the work gone into this project so far, you’ll know that the aim was to recreate the filming model, with one or two intentional deviations. That meant those on-screen shades of greys were out the window, and the blue / green tones were getting their long-awaited turn in the spotlight!
Probert's specified hull colours for the Enterprise D, posted to his Instagram account in 2024
Let’s just touch on colour matching for a moment, because understanding some of the fundamental limitations is absolutely critical when trying to get exact colour matches of a given subject. Colour matching is as much art as it is science, and to get a really close match to a colour sample you need to apply both disciplines. Or you can do what I did and make it someone else’s problem…but I’ll get back to that later! Without getting into the weeds and losing anyone who’s still reading this, here’s the bottom line: trying to match colours using images displayed on screens like monitors, tablets or smart phones is an utter waste of time. You’d need a fully calibrated display which gives absolutely reliable and accurate colour and tonal values. You also need images which were taken in very specific (and known) lighting conditions and preferably with a colour calibration chart in-frame, which you could then use to calibrate the image using some kind of image editing software. Only then, with all those conditions satisfied, could you begin to trust the image on your display as being somewhere near accurate to how the subject in question actually looked in reality under neutral light. Even then, there’s a good chance you’d be off by some margin. Bottom line: if you want to get as accurate as reasonably possible, don’t bother using images on a lit display screen. For absolute accuracy (or as close as possible, at least) there’s no substitute for a physical colour chip, unused original paint, or other similar sample to reference your paint mixes to.
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Back to the project then. Given that the original 4’ studio model was crated up in a storage facility somewhere in California, the chances of getting hold of a physical sample was nil. No chance. Impossible. Well, actually it wasn’t…! By some absolute miracle (the 2nd miracle in this entire project really, if you count the casts of the studio model being only 20mins from my front door when this all started!) the original studio model had been quietly taken out of storage and was going through a cosmetic restoration by John Goodson at the same time I was building her new sister! Not only one, but two 4’ Enterprise D’s were being worked on in tandem…turns out they’re a bit like buses – you wait decades for one, then two come along at the same time! For those that don’t know the name, John is an ex-ILM Model Shop Supervisor with a very long list of amazing credits to his name. He oversaw the refurbishment and re-paint of the 6’ D for Star Trek: Generations and was part of the team who painstakingly restored the 11’ TOS Enterprise model for the Smithsonian, so the 4’ D studio model was in very experienced and safe hands. Over the next few months, what began as two separate parallel projects became something of a collaboration, as the original model was in desperate need of new hull graphics and some missing access cover panels, and I needed accurate colour data and detailed reference if I was to replicate the complex “Aztec” hull plating pattern on the surface of the model.
Decades of dirt and grease, being painstakingly cleaned off the original 4' filming model
The "cobra head" and dorsal hull, showing several large cracks. You can just make out where the large phaser canon of the "All Good Things" future Enterprise was attached to the top of the leading edge, then repainted after removal
The starboard nacelle, broken away from the pylon. The nacelle root has long since crumbled away and been replaced with a basic shape, which has also now begun to deteriorate. The root is also the wrong colour and doesn't match the adjacent colours
Keel mount position. The paint layers have cracked and shattered, almost like glass or glazed ceramic. You can see the serial ports used as electrical umbilical connectors, either side of the post socket
Dorsal "face", showing several large cracks and crumbling paint along the edges. Pieces of painted vinyl tape were used to cover the seams of the removable section, from below the shuttle bay doors to just under the main impulse engine. Vinyl was also used to cover screw heads - one of the screws is exposed on the port side of the face
As you can see from the photos, the studio model hull is a bit of a patchwork of multiple different shades and hues of the two main hull colours underneath all that decades-old dirt and grime. The model was refurbished and repaired more than once during the production of TNG, it had the “Future D” modifications added and then removed again for the “All Good Things” episodes, it was relabelled as the Odyssey for DS9 and then relabelled again back to the Enterprise etc etc. All of this work over the years has meant that paint would inevitably have been damaged and would need to be touched up again and again, resulting in plenty of mis-matched paint hues all over the model. In the intervening years since retiring from production use, the model obviously had quite a rough time of things, as evidenced by the caked-on dirt and grime, and the amount of damage all over. Some damages had obvious signs of past repairs which added even more inconsistencies to the hull colours, and the model was in a very sorry state overall by the time it reached John’s hands!
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Once the hull colours had been physically scanned, the RBG and CIELAB data could be used to have custom paints made. This process in itself was quite tricky, as even with the exact colour data to go by, getting exact paint matches made was extremely difficult – this is where the “art” side of the colour matching equation comes into play. I decided to make it someone else’s problem and had the paints made by an automotive paint manufacturer, rather than waste time and money trying to mix them myself! After several weeks of sample iterations and tweaking, the final paints were within one or two points of the target RGB values, close enough that you’d never perceive the difference. Besides, with all the different hues on the original there were as many hits as misses when it came to matching to specific panels!
All the dirt and grime, gradually cleaned away using cotton buds...!
Upper saucer fully cleaned and touch-up where necessary, and wearing new main registry hull graphics. You can just make out that the port nacelle has broken off completely, yet to be reattached
The original hull colours slowly being revealed under all that grime
The original cover panel for this mount point was long since gone, so I sent John a casting of the one I made for the replica - something I made is now part of the original...I never would've expected something like that to ever happen!
Cosmetic restoration completed. The original 4' Enterprise D filming model was carefully packed into a crate and delivered back to one of Paramount/CBS's storage facilities - 2023
With the main hull colours ready to go, the next task was to map out the “Aztec” patterns over the entire ship and create a set of vinyl masks to replicate them. The aztec patterns on the 4’ studio model are actually very different than the 6’, particularly the secondary hull, dorsal hull and nacelles. Thankfully, Greg Jein pretty much stuck to the differences in the raised plating when he picked out which ones were going to be green or blue, so it was a relatively simple matter of taking surface rubbings and tracings of the surfaces and scanning those into the computer – basically the same approached I used way back, when refurbishing the raw parts all those months ago! To make life a little easier for myself and help make the panels more visible through the masking tape, I used a very fine-tipped marker to trace out all the raised panels on the surfaces of a set of “test” casts – these were the very first set of casts pulled from the moulds, which were too thin and had too many casting problems to be used for the actual build but proved very useful for testing ideas etc during the construction of the armature. At the risk of pointing out the obvious, this model is a bit on the large side, so it took quite a lot of sheets of paper to get all the surfaces surveyed and scanned! Then it was a case of pulling the scans into the CAD software, tracing them as accurately as possible, and creating the cut files for the masks. Weeks and weeks of work, distilled into a couple of sentences, right there…! The vinyl cutters, once again proving they’re worth their weight in gold, made this process infinitely faster, more accurate, and very repeatable.
Spraying the hundreds of escape pod hatches - much easier to mask them off and paint over than vice-versa
Sheet of vinyl masks for the many escape pod hatches
All underside escape pod hatches painted and masked
An example of how the raised panelling and other features were traced, before being scanned into the computer. This was done over the entire model...
Escape pod hatches painted with slightly different shades, as per the original 4' model
Applying the escape pod hatches, one by one...
All upper escape pod hatches painted and masked
...which required a LOT of paper. Each sheet has tracings on both sides!
While the cutters were churning out masks, I got the paint sprayer out and tried to ignore the fact that my spray booth was utterly incapable of coping with the size of the model and volume of spraying that was coming its way! The main base colour of the hull was blue, with the green being the “accent” panels. Reasoning that it’d be easier to mask the green panels and finish with the main blue; I got to work spraying the green hull colour all over the model.
First layer of the green hull basecoat being applied. Yeah, that spray booth was working overtime to keep the air moving...!
You'd think a model this size would be easy to paint, but there's always a tricky spot!
Green hull basecoat curing
Masking the hull plating was actually quite a quick and easy task, thanks to the amount of legwork done beforehand. After a couple of days, the entire model was masked off and the blue paint was firing out the 0.8mm sprayer nozzle! Pulling up all the masks was also a very quick process and quite satisfying after the amount of work that had gone into replicating the pattern as closely as possible. Other than the main hull colours, there aren’t many other painted features on the main hull of the Enterprise D – phasers, shuttle bay doors, that’s about it. I chose to mix those colours myself since they were in such small quantities, it didn’t make sense to have 250ml cans of automotive paints made for them! Things were progressing well now, but there was just the small issue of the missing nacelles, deflector dish assembly, saucer impulse engines, and accurate hull graphics.
Underside masks coming along nicely
Upper masks being applied one at a time, to maintain accurate positioning with the raised plating details
Spraying the main blue basecoat
Main blue basecoat curing, before all the masks are removed
Phaser strips masked, ready for painting
All painting complete, and all window masks removed. It really came to life at this point...!
Underside lighting and paint check. I Love this angle, those elongated lower saucer windows look so good!
A look at the arboretum cover panel. The seam line is there, but not as visible as before. Plenty of things to distract the eye...
One of the unexpected benefits of this project is that it brought me into contact with a few people I never imagined I’d ever really speak to, outside of the usual generic interactions in some random social media comment sections. One of those names that people might recognise is Gary Kerr, who was a close friend of Greg and basically THE expert when it comes to the original series Enterprise – he was a consultant on the Smithsonian team who forensically surveyed and painstakingly restored the 11’ TOS Enterprise filming model, along with John Goodson. Around about the same time I found out the 4’ D studio model was being restored, I was also put in touch with Gary, who owned an unused production made decal sheet which Greg Jein had printed decades ago. This decal sheet featured a LOT of graphics and details, and packed in amongst them were all the hull graphics used on the 4’ D studio model. For obvious reasons, we weren’t about to start cutting up that sheet and use them, it was too valuable as a piece of TV production history, not to mention far too old to expect them to be usable, but we could redraw the specific graphics needed and print brand new decal sheets, thereby solving John’s issue with needing new graphics for his on-going restoration of the original, and my need for this replica. Painstakingly redrawn by Karl Tate and agonised over by myself and John to make sure they were all as accurate as possible, the new graphics artwork was ready to go. High quality decal printing is another one of those “leave it to those who have the proper equipment for it” things, so they were done by Keith Tomlinson of Cozmic Scale Models, here in the UK.
My original production made decal sheet. Greg Jein had many of these printed and used them for several filming models
The redrawn decal sheets, printed by Keith Tomlinson at Cozmic Scale Models in the UK
Something I’d like to put to rest while we’re talking about hull graphics – there’s a long-standing belief that the 4’ D studio model had black registry numbers and lettering, rather than the dark blue as stipulated by Andrew Probert and applied on the 6’ model. I understand completely why this belief has held for so long - in every photo and video clip of the 4’ D since TNG first aired, the registry graphics look black. I was convinced they were too and therefore should also be black on the new redrawn decal sheets, even when assured by Gary and John that they were not actually black, but very dark blue. In the back of my mind, even after the decals had been printed, a tiny voice kept whispering “they should be black…people are gonna point that out straight away!”
Fast-forward a year or so, after both the replica and the restoration of the original studio model were complete, I was able to get hold of another one of those production decal sheets (Greg had many printed over the years and used them on several filming models). The very first thing I checked was those registry graphics……………THEY WERE BLUE! NOT BLACK! VERY, VERY, DARK BLUE!!! So dark in fact, that they even register as black in any photo’s I’ve taken of my own sheet, unless you get really close and put something that actually is black in the frame for the camera to reference to. Having eaten my hat, I hereby publicly apologise to Gary and John for ever doubting them! Now, I’ll admit that the redrawn graphics on the new decal sheets are a touch too light blue, I would have preferred them to be a little darker, but that’s just something I’ll have to live with. Who knows, maybe I’ll get the chance to have them reprinted slightly darker and correct them on the replica one day…?
The registry numbering and lettering on the original production made decal sheets were DEFINITELY dark blue, not black. The 4' studio model was decorated with one of these sheets - the main registry was never black!
It was around this time that I finally came into possession of an original nacelle cast, as well as a bussard collector and saucer impulse engine. The hull graphics were already being applied at this point, but that was put on pause while I repeated the same steps as before and moulded, cast, built and painted the nacelles. The only remaining missing parts now were the deflector dish, and there was no sign of getting original casts for it at that point. So, I decided to fabricate temporary deflector dish parts which could be easily removed, with the intention of swapping it for original parts in the future, should they come my way. Eventually, a year or so after completion of the model, I was very generously given a set of original deflector dish parts. The parts were moulded and recast in clear resin and installed in the model while it was on display at the museum. Maybe I’ll make an addendum section which shows the nacelles and deflector dish construction & swap-out processes in more detail, but for now there’s no need to go over all those steps in great detail again. Below are a few photos showing some key moments of the nacelle installation process and the recast original deflector parts being prepped for installation.
Lower halves of the nacelles. Grilles masked, parts lightblocked and primed. Figuring out the nacelle roots, the removable sections will cover the screws that will secure the nacelle armatures to the pylon armature
Test fitting the nacelle armatures and lower casts
A look inside a nacelle, before the top half is glued into place
Bussard collectors, cast in translucent red resin. They came out a bit too "candy" red, but they look great when lit!
Upper nacelle half clamped into position while the epoxy cures. I used the same access panel as the original, made sense to do that...!
Testing the nacelle lighting
Moulded and recast original deflector parts. The pour stubs aren't on the original parts, I moulded and cast these slightly differently so needed to add them
Painted deflector, ready to go
With all the missing parts finally taken care of with either original casts or temporary stand-ins, the final stages of the build could continue uninterrupted. The pace of the project was rapidly increasing, and after 2+ years by this point, the finish line was suddenly rushing towards me. All that was left was to apply the last few hull graphics and give the model a subtle pass of weathering to take off the “new” shine…
Tweaking the position of the strongback pinstriping
Keel cover plate
Underside saucer transporter emitter pad decals & lower saucer mount cover panel
Lower saucer main registry
I won't lie, this was a big moment for me...and I was feeling it!
I literally had goosebumps whilst applying the main name and registry. This was a dream project, in every sense. I felt very privileged at this moment!
Over two years in the making....a dream come true!!!