While I have been waiting for the next issues of my 1:900 scale U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701-D build, I decided to spend some time learning more with Photoshop.
I started with a digital copy of my set of Enterprise D blueprints authored by Rick Sternbach back in July 1996. If you look closely at the ‘Parts Locator’ section of the Eaglemoss magazines, these blueprints are what they used as well. I then modified them to act as a sort of ‘progress tracker’ and to show which parts of the ship we will be working on for each stage of the build. For example, Stage 30 looks like this:
The section in red is the new area of focus, while the sections in grey have already been worked on. Hopefully, this will help in some way!
Nice work. Thanks.
One hint though:
If you make a separate layer for the gray and red color fills and place it above the blueprint line art layer in the “Layers” list hierarchy, and then change the blending mode for the color fills layer from “Normal” to “Multiply” — the line art for the blueprint will be clean and clear.
Awesome tip Dean! I do have each stage’s fills as separate layers so the blueprint layer is not modified. I did try Multiply, but it darkens the colors too much. Unfortunately, the blueprint layer is not line art, but a raster scan of the original paper blueprints. I spent two days just cleaning up the background and removing all of the callout lines.
Beautiful! Just need the supply chain woes to ease and maybe we’ll get some more parts to build…