Gemini XII - Agena EVA 1/48, pt. 2: Gemini cockpit & astronaut

And on we go.
It's been some time and it feels good to have regained some time to fiddle with glue and paper.
After the Agena it's time for the docked Gemini spacecraft. The idea was to show it with the hatch opened during Buzz' space walk. So the interior is visible and of course, Jim Lovell in the commander's seat is visible as well. So I had to do the interior and an astronaut inside as well.

Here is the result, the pictures of the build are after the jump.

Yes, the astronaut is made of paper, too. The helmet however, is not.

I started out with cutting the outer hull of the Gemini. On one side I removed the complete hatch, the other side just the concave indent in the hatch.

To make things more complicated, I also "riveted" the outer skin with an embossing needle. It just gives the skin a little more authenticity. It looks very present here on the picture, in real life it blends in much better. 

The windows in the hatches both got a transparent piece of plastic. The open hatch a dark blue one, the closed one a colour known as "daylight". So you can still look inside if all goes well. The dark blue I chose because the opened hatch would leave no colour on the glass but space is dark, so I wanted to make it look more like you can see "space" through it. (does that make any sense?)

   

I put the hull aside for the time being and started with the interior of the cockpit. I felt the need to give the side panels a little more depth so I cut the panels out of a spare part and glued them on to mat paper. Looks good, I think.  I also have to say that this is a great model to build. Dan Shippey really did a great job on designing the interior. It all fits very well and it really looks the part.

The first chair. small bits, lots of edge gluing, slow working gives better results. All the edges were coloured after gluing with grey colour pencil.

Then, the astronaut. Jim Lovell. I wanted to do this in paper, so I just started out with crumpling a small piece of paper into a small torso-like shape. Then I put some paper around (all 80 gram regular printer paper) to make it a little smoother. The arms were rolled as one part, with a piece in the middle that would attach to the "shoulders" of the torso. I used small cocktail sticks as dowels to bend the arms. 

Well, you know how it goes, when you're modelling you sometimes forget to make pictures of all the stages. Here's the body of Jim Lovell some stages later. I added legs, rolled in the same manner as the arms. The gloves actually are flat but curved and the fingers folded to give a sense of mass. The arms got a small metallic rim for the gloves. The harness was made out of very thin strips of black paper and tiny parts of aluminium tape.

Then, the helmet. I needed to give them both a helmet, of course. And paper wasn't the right material. I used two fishing lead balls. I opened them and flattened one of the ball's halves with a pair of tweezers.
 

After some moulding and fiddling it got a layer of white gloss paint. I cut a visor out of the same material I used for the windows, dark blue plastic from a LEE gel filter sample booklet. (The gel filters used for stage lighting, something I used to do a long time ago) 

I glued Jim's body in his seat. I didn't make his left foot, because you won't be able to see it. After that I added some glue to the back of the seat and glued the helmet on the torso.

 
 This is what you will be able to see from the other side. Looks good to me.

Up next is Buzz' chair and then I can enclose the cabin into the outer hull. That is for next time. For now I say enjoy whatever you do, thanks for stopping by and see you around.
--PK